Actress Eva Green makes for a reluctant Bond girl

Newly minted Bond girl Eva Green has the kind of archetypal beauty that makes it almost impossible to interview the 26-year-old actress about her role opposite Daniel Craig in "Casino Royale" without stammering out the questions.

It's not surprising since exquisiteness has long been the prerequisite for being cast in a major female role in a James Bond flick. Forty years after the classic scene in 1962's "Dr. No" when Ursula Andress emerges from the ocean in a bikini, Halle Berry made a parallel debut in "Die Another Day," stepping onto a beach in a similar bathing suit. Not exactly the great leap of evolution that came when the first tetrapods - sans bikinis - crawled from the sea millions of years ago.

The French actress, however, insists she would never have taken the role of Vesper Lynd in the 21st installment of the longest-running film franchise in history, opening Friday, if she just played another notch in the British secret agent's already whittled-down bedpost.

"The movie is very different from the others," said Green. "The Bond girls are less iconic, so it's more ... human. I prefer to call her Vesper,' rather than aBond girl.'

"I just wanted to make her as human as possible, rather than just beautiful and sexy," said Green.

Vesper Lynd is not just any femme fatale; she's the woman that wins and ultimately breaks James Bond's heart in Ian Fleming's 1953 novel, "Casino Royale," which first introduced 007.

Director Martin Campbell called the character "the best female role in all of Fleming's books."

Vesper's the integral role in "Casino Royale," a movie already heavily scrutinized since it marks Craig's first turn in the tuxedo as Bond. Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson reportedly approached established actresses like Charlize Theron and Thandie Newton for the role before switching gears and signing Green in February, after shooting had already started.

In the movie, Vesper is a British Treasury agent, assigned to provide the money Bond needs to enter a high-stakes poker game at the titular casino in order to flush out the villainous Le Chiffre, banker to many of the world's terrorists. From her first scene in the film, sitting across from Bond on a train en route to Montenegro, she has to parry the randy secret agent's flirtations with witty rejoinders fired at the pace of a Walther P99.

"They're very, very similar, I think, like brothers and sisters in the beginning, I would say," said Green. "I like the way they flirt with one another. It's very verbal, rather than physical."

For Green, whose first language is French, it was a hard sequence to film, requiring intensive work on a "posh" English accent with a dialect coach.

"We actually had a day's filming, where we had to do that scene over and over again," said Craig. "She just nailed it, absolutely nailed it.

"It's incredibly important that we got that right and she absolutely made that her own, and therefore all that plot and all the love story works fantastically because of her."

While relatively new to the business, Green made a name for herself with her performance in her 2003 film debut, Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers." Last year, she starred in Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven," and she is already prepping for her next big Hollywood role, reuniting with Craig on the film adaptation of the Phillip Pullman novel, "His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass."

Green's also making an impression on the harshest critics - longtime Bond fans. Many who have seen the film early have compared her performance to that of Diana Rigg, who played Tracy Di Vicenzo in 1969's "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." Tracy was the only other woman to break Bond's heart - she was gunned down by the nefarious Ernst Stavro Blofeld minutes after Bond married her.

But Green steered clear of watching previous Bond films for inspiration. Far from feeling part of a glamorous pantheon, she dismisses most of the previous canon as chauvinist fantasies - with the notable exception of Honor Blackman's role as Pussy Galore in 1964's "Goldfinger."

After all, what self-possessed aspiring actress grows up dreaming of spouting lines like, "I think I will enjoy very much serving under you," as Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) famously said to Sean Connery's Bond in 1967's "You Only Live Twice."

Being a Bond girl can be a mixed blessing, as Jane Seymour - a classically trained actress who starred as one of Bond's (Roger Moore) conquests in 1973's "Live and Let Die" - told MovieWeb.com.

"I was not a T&A actress, I never, it was never what I wanted to be," said Seymour. "And, so when I went up for really great roles with great directors ... they would almost hire me and then they'd look at my bio and see that I'd been a Bond girl and they wouldn't see me again, wouldn't speak to me again."

Caterina Murino plays more of the traditional template of a Bond girl: Solange, the glamorous, yet discontented wife of one of Le Chiffre's henchmen, who blurts out her husband's whereabouts to 007 in the throes of passion.

"It was something a little different," said Murino, seemingly without a trace of irony. "Reading the script, I found that Solange was not only beautiful - she doesn't use her beauty."

"If (the industry is) going to see me just as a Bond girl, then they're just going to offer me roles (only based on) my beauty."

But the Italian actress is quick to point out there is more than meets the eye candy. Murino, who originally planned to become a doctor, is a goodwill ambassador for the African Medical and Research Foundation, an NGO dedicated to improving health care in poverty stricken regions of that continent.

In August, she made a trip to a Nairobi slum to visit children orphaned by AIDS - a world away from the posh Bahamian set where her character frolicked on horseback through the surf. (Though Murino would disagree on that definition of fun, having broken several ribs and injured her back in a fall from a horse while practicing for her audition.)

The 32-year-old actress hopes that her exposure from "Casino Royale" will draw attention to her charity work.

Like many other female moviegoers, Murino and Green both said they would rather spy Craig onscreen - emerging from the sea Ursula Andress-style, wearing a tight-fitting bathing suit - then watch themselves parading around in tight-fitting dresses.

"It's just more balanced," said Green. "When you see him coming out of the sea, it's quite a funny joke, you know?"

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(c) 2006, New York Daily News. Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.