When Ukrainian model-turned-actor Olga Kurylenko scored the coveted role of Camille, opposite Daniel Craig in the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, her friends wanted to know only one thing.

"I couldn't believe my friends were sending me emails asking, 'Is he wearing that hot blue bikini?'," she says, laughing. "I said, 'Yes, that's all he wears, the whole movie'."

Kurylenko is, of course, referring to the rather snug pair of budgie smugglers worn by Craig in his first outing as the British super spy in Casino Royale. At the time, the diminutive brunette was just one of millions of women who swooned as Craig dragged his supremely buffed bod out of the surf, but it clearly made an impression.

She hasn't seen all 22 of the official Bond films (they were banned as being "anti-Communist" when she was growing up in the Soviet Union), but readily names Casino Royale, which rebooted the tired franchise in spectacular fashion in 2006, as her favorite.

"When I watched it, I was a long way from thinking that I would be doing the next one, but I thought it was a great movie," she says. "I thought Daniel was a great choice."

The Quantum of Solace role was almost gift wrapped for her -- she got the news while celebrating Christmas Eve in Paris, which has been her home since modeling took her there at the age of 16.

She even happily embraces the title of "Bond girl", which tends to conjure up images of vapid sex bombs, whose main duty is to look good in something clingy, scream on cue and be rescued and bedded (not necessarily in that order) by 007.

"I am honored," she says of the moniker. "It's such a great experience. I don't have to lie and make it all sound good, because I really truly feel all this."

If Kurylenko is happy to be called a Bond girl, it's probably because her character is much more than the run-of-the- mill bimbo with the double-entendre name (Plenty O'Toole and Holly Goodhead, we salute you). The mysterious and feisty Camille -- half Russian, half Bolivian -- is motivated largely by revenge upon the man who killed her family in front of her when she was young.

Director Marc Foster, who had the enviable task of watching tapes of 400 women from around the world to cast the role, confirms he was looking for substance as well as beauty.

"Crazy as it may sound, very few of them were beautiful and believable," he says. "The role of the woman has changed in the world, it's three-dimensional now. You can't present a woman for her looks only, it doesn't work any more.

"Most of the women today are smarter than men anyway and they have more and more powerful jobs. So you can't purely symbolize a woman as a sex symbol, it's two-dimensional and you just can't do that.

"Olga made a French film called The Ring Finger and her performance is stunning. I think she has depth. She is smart and a very deep, three-dimensional woman. On top of that, she is gorgeous and all those aspects together worked for me for the character."

Kurylenko agrees: "Camille is quite a strong woman, very independent. She is smart, focused and skilful. She's got the tools to fight, but also she isn't afraid to use her feminine charm. I don't think Camille is a typical Bond girl. She is one of the only Bond girls in the history of the films who does not sleep with Bond."

She traveled to London, Panama and the remote Chilean desert to film Quantum of Solace, all of which were a world away from her modest upbringing in the provincial Ukrainian town of Berdyansk. Her father left when Kurylenko was a baby and she was raised by her art teacher mother, with help from a grandmother, uncles, aunt and cousins, all of whom lived in the same flat. She says now that if money was in short supply, love and support certainly weren't.

She began her acting career playing Santa Claus's young wife in a school play, but her star began to rise at age 16, when she was seen by a model scout in the subway in Moscow, where she was on holiday. She moved to Paris to work, appearing on the covers of magazines such as Vogue and Elle. At 19, in 1999, she married French photographer Cedric Van Mol, but their union broke down after four years.

Her first leading role was l'Annulaire (The Ring Finger), a racy, art house French film based on a Japanese book, and she followed that with a role alongside Elijah Wood in Paris Je T'Aime, an independent film in which a cooperative of acclaimed international directors told their stories of Paris.

Her first English-speaking role was in last year's Hitman, a bloody movie adaptation of the video game of the same name. She has just returned to that genre opposite Mark Wahlberg in Max Payne, which opened here last month.

Nothing in those roles could have possibly prepared her for the Bond juggernaut, but she says that the warm welcome she received and the well-oiled movie machine she encountered on set made her job a good deal easier.

"You can feel that it's a family, which is very unusual for a big movie," she says. "People are doing it because they want to and because they love it." Which is not to say it was all vodka martinis and Aston Martins -- the world of a big-budget blockbuster is quite a quantum leap from the glitz and glamour of the catwalk.

Inspired by Craig, who does many of his own stunts, Kurylenko went home night after night bruised and sore from the intense training. "I did rehearsal with guns -- how to fire, position, aiming, how to strip it and put it back together," she says.

"The guy from the prop department was always saying, 'Sorry, this is the boring bit, how can we make it more fun?' So, we started doing it in seconds. He started timing me. I started out at 25 seconds and got down to eight. He did it in 15."