Since lighting up 2008’s otherwise leaden Hitman, Ukrainian-born beauty Olga Kurylenko has been a Bond girl (Quantum Of Solace), a Celtic warrior (Centurion) and a Terence Malick muse (To The Wonder).
As if that wasn’t evidence enough of her range, the 33-year-old former model is appearing in two of the most anticipated sci-fi flicks of recent years. The first is Oblivion, a $120m-budget Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Cruise and released 11 April. The second is Empires Of The Deep, a $130m Chinese underwater epic starring nobody and released god knows when.
Set in 2073 and directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy), Oblivion casts Cruise as a lonely repairman stationed on a deserted Earth devasted by alien invasion. Kurylenko beat Noomi Rapace, Olivia Wilde and Brit Marling to her role, taking over from Jessica Chastain when she dropped out to make Zero Dark Thirty. “I haven’t seen the finished movie yet, but it’s full of beautiful imagery, just like To The Wonder,” she tells us. “But Oblivion is magnificent in a different way, because the sets they built, everything is so sleek and shiny and futuristic, it’s so cool, it just looks like nothing we’ve ever seen before. It’s going to be very aesthetically beautiful.”
Footage of Cruise’s full-sized spaceship is available on YouTube, and looks extraordinary. As does the Empires trailer – albeit for different reasons. “Ooh, I don’t know what I’m expecting from that,” laughs Olga of the film she shot in 2010. “I have no idea! They’ve taken such a long time. Is it coming out?”
The short answer is, nobody knows. Although the meme-tastic, mermaid-filled trailer did the rounds last year to snorts of nerdy derision, the finished film remains suspiciously MIA. Can we really expect the “Chinese Avatar”? “Well that’s what they said! I can’t say because I haven’t seen the result. I shot a lot on green-screen, it’s going to be so computerised I have no idea what they came up with. No one has seen it, they’ve been working on it, but no one knows. I’m intrigued about it myself.”
“We’ve seen sci-fi, we’ve seen post-apocalyptic movies, but we haven’t seen this story”
Perhaps fans should save their enthusiasm for Oblivion. “No matter how many sci-fi films we’ve seen, I think – or I hope – this story is original because there is an element that I haven’t seen before so it is something different,” she says. “We’ve seen sci-fi, we’ve seen post-apocalyptic movies, but we haven’t seen this story!”
Whether Empires ever surfaces, or Oblivion steals the summer, Kurylenko is just happy to keep people on their toes. “It’s great because I get to do completely different things,” she says. “And that’s what’s fun, I wouldn’t want to do the same thing over and over.” From what we’ve seen so far, there’s no danger of that.
