- Photos:
-
Being a Bond girl isn’t easy. Just ask Olga Kurylenko, who endured a month of 4-hour daily training sessions before starring in the latest Bond flick, “Quantum of Solace.”
“I’ve never done so much training,” Kurylenko, 28, recalls. “The first day was hard because my body was not used to it and everything hurt.”
That wasn’t all the preparation. To play Camille, a Bolivian bombshell who teams up with 007, the Ukrainian-born actress worked incessantly on her accent, recording friends from Spain and Argentina and learning the different dynamics to different accents. But something she didn’t learn was how to behave in the bedroom: Camille is the first Bond girl who doesn’t sleep with the main man.
Metromix talked to Kurylenko about Bond’s usual effect on the fairer sex, filming rigorous action scenes and her fear of flying out of a boat.
Why does Bond have such a way with the ladies?
He’s such a charming guy and he’s such a hero because he always wins! It’s a fantasy. A lot of movies are made to make us dream. It’s kind of this perfect man … I think women are attracted to this kind of guys that are strong and good-looking.
Could he still get girls if he drove a ’92 Accord?
[Laughs] Well, for me, it doesn’t matter what car a person drives. It’s all about the connection.
You did a lot of work to prepare for the movie. What was it like to train for the skydiving scene in a wind tunnel?
I remember after the first session, the next morning I woke up I couldn’t lift my arms up. When you fly you have to do certain positions. You’re upright with your body, you decide whether you go up or down, left or right, if you turn, spin, if you want to turn on your back and fly on your back—that’s really hard. All that, it’s crazy. By the end of the month, I could stay 40 minutes in that tunnel and nothing hurt … I would go back to the tunnel just for fun.
Were there any scenes that you didn’t know if you’d be able to do?
I think the difficult scene for me was the boat scene. It was very, very intense. ‘Cause the boat was going very fast and there were waves in the ocean and the boat kept jumping up and down, we had sound guys falling out of the boats. I don’t know how we didn’t fall out because we couldn’t hold on. We had to fight. So we had to be really stable on our feet and somehow get it done.
What were you thinking?
I was thinking, “I’m going to fall out. I’m just going to fall out of the boat.” Because the boat is jumping. It’s really hard. And it’s under the hot sun in Panama. It was constantly hot. And we kept getting tanner and tanner. I mean, I was. I was really dark by the end.
Find showtimes for “Quantum of Solace.”
