Bond girl Olga Kurylenko counts her blessings
From model to actress Kurylenko is game for any role including being director Terrence Malick's muse and star of his latest film, writes James Mottram
It's just after lunchtime and Olga Kurylenko is raiding the mini-bar of her London hotel suite - not for alcohol, but to see if there's any sugar for her coffee. "They should have sugar in the mini-bar," she says, but all she can find are chocolate bars, which she considers dipping into her espresso until I tell her that's a bit weird. "I am weird," she retorts. "What do you want to do? At this point, I can't hide it, can I?"
Maybe not. But, at least until now, the slender, dark-haired Ukrainian has managed to keep any oddities under wraps while building an impressive film career. A former model who graced the covers of Vogue and Elle when she was 18, she starred in French hit thriller The Serpent before featuring in 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace - which proved a baptism by fire for her. "I was like a machine for two months, flying all round the world, doing all these premieres and promotions," she says. "But it's a good school. I learnt a lot."
Surviving the curse of the Bond girl that has derailed so many young hopefuls, the now 33-year-old Kurylenko has recently starred opposite Tom Cruise in sci-fi film Oblivion and Colin Farrell in Seven Psychopaths. But, far more intriguingly, she's become the latest muse for Terrence Malick. The director behind Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line is an enigma to the media, shying away from publicity of any sort. So why is "Terry" - as all his collaborators dub him - so secretive?
"It's not that," Kurylenko says. "He's shy. I can see it. He's so shy. I don't want to speak for him, but he's one of those people. I think he can't talk about himself. He could probably talk to you about something else, but not about himself. He's not that kind of person. He's not that vain." Plus, she says, he doesn't want to offer pat sound bites about his work. "That's why his movies are mysterious."
As frustrating as it is beautiful, To the Wonder is unlikely to win Malick any fresh converts. With its doomed love story told in glances and whispers, the film is even more experimental than his 2011 Cannes-winning opus The Tree of Life, as Kurylenko's single mother Marina uproots her life in Paris to be with Ben Affleck's Oklahoma engineer. So strange is the film, Affleck barely speaks a word, with the story driven by Marina's hushed voiceover.