Olga Kurylenko took a pause from jury duties and stepped into the Deadline studio at the ongoing Red Sea International Film Festival. She broke down her role here at the Festival, a plethora of new and upcoming projects, and reflected on being part of the Bond universe as well as in the MCU.
In terms of her own work, Kurylenko has a new movie, Turbulence, coming out and she told us she has just wrapped on Season 2 of Prime Video series The Terminal List with Chris Pratt as well as Ireland-shot movie The Man With The Urn, which she said could be getting a tweaked title as The Man With Three Urns. She is also just off Let God Sort It Out, from UK filmmaker Jamie Adams. “It was a lot of improv,” she said about the film. “It’s gonna be a total surprise for all of us…we did so many different versions and so many different shots, we were just exploring.”
Kurylenko also reflected on her time playing Taskmaster in Black Widow and Thunderbolts. Spoiler alert: Her character’s arc ends up very short in the latter movie after script changes were made. “They were changing the stories, I think that [there were] too many characters,” she said. “The thing is with Marvel, you never know. The superheroes die all the time, and they’re never dead.” She added: “In one in one story, you disappear, suddenly you come back… I think you just never die.”
She also looked back on her time in Bond, playing Bolivian intelligence operative Camille Montes in Quantum of Solace, and having to nail speaking English with an Hispanic accent. “I guess if I didn’t figure it out, I wouldn’t have been cast, because I think I was the only non-Hispanic person or Spanish speaker amongst the contenders. People confuse it. The whole point of being an actor is portraying someone who you’re not. When I played a Turkish woman in The Water Diviner, I learned Turkish, I took classes.”
Talking about being on the Red Sea jury, the actress said she’s always mindful of the effort required to bring a feature to life. “I know how much work, how much time, how much craft and energy goes into making a movie, it’s such a complex machine,” Kurylenko said. “Mostly what I am looking for in a movie is to be to have a connection with the story.”