Bond girl

The fragile Frenchwoman Lea Seydoux was afraid that she would not be able to make people believe in her heroine - a Bond girl who could be not only a beauty, but also an accomplice. Afisha talked to the actress about what it was like to scold and analyze the legendary special agent on screen.

- Leave me alone! - a disheveled but strictly dressed blonde shouts against the backdrop of snow-capped mountains in the face of James Bond himself. - Why should I trust you at all?

“Because right now I’m your best chance to stay alive,” he answers with fiery seriousness, but it’s noticeable on his face that he’s nervous. First of all, women rarely talk to him like that. Secondly, anyone who has watched at least a couple of films in the franchise knows that the spy manages to save beautiful girls from death much less often than he plans. But I don’t want to let her off the screen so easily: there is something elusively alive in her, which is why you need to take a closer look at her.

“When I was offered the role of Madeleine Swann, I didn’t yet know what kind of character she would be,” says Léa Seydoux with a noticeable French accent. Today it is indeed becoming increasingly difficult to speak with confidence about expectations from the next Bond series. For decades, it was a coherent system consisting of, as Lev Danilkin once wrote in Afisha, a typical set of components: “a song under the credits + girls + cars + exotic places + villains + jokes + gadgets + a story about saving the world, most reminiscent of the script for a children’s New Year’s party.” But to be alive, you need to be flexible, and periodically a new director is trusted to shake the canon. Today Sam Mendes, who sent Bond in the last episode, is working on this task

performed by Daniel Craig through the circles of hell: to the threshold of death, through professional incompetence to a meeting with his own evil alter ego and further - in plain text - “into the past”, where only one can deal with the present. In Skyfall, the director built some new, obviously chic and fast car from old spare parts, but how it will behave around corners is still unknown. “SPECTRE” develops all the main conflict lines of the previous series: the secret department of British intelligence is disbanded here, and Bond again goes AWOL and almost single-handedly tries to deal with an entire underground intelligence network, which in a strange way turns out to be tied precisely to his personality. His guide will be a strong-willed blonde in a black coat, played by Seydoux.

“Everything was kept in the strictest confidence, so I couldn’t even read the script. But it was impossible to say no to James Bond, no one would do that,” laughs Seydoux, who generally agrees to a film not for her own role, but in the name of some big idea. This may be a desire to become part of something classic (besides Bond there were Beauty and the Beast and Mission Impossible), but more often it is the opportunity to work with a great director. As confirmation, a quick glance at her filmography is enough: three dozen films, half of them are stellar author’s projects, in which she played supporting and third-rate heroines. Yes, there were several blockbusters among them,