Bond girl Olga Kurylenko's gruesome work in new film 'Centurion'

Olga Kurylenko has told how she struggled to behead a life-like model of a Roman soldier in new film Centurion.

The Bond girl, who plays mute Pict warrior Etain in the action epic, told Esquire magazine: "I was shocked - it was a doll, but they had made it exactly as if it was a real person, with the same tendons, arteries, muscles and veins, so when my axe hit the neck nothing happened.

"I had to hit it 20 times before it gave way and the blood started spurting - I guess cutting someone's head off is not that easy!"

Olga, who shares the screen with Dominic West, Michael Fassbender and David Morrissey in the film, also revealed how the props team used "the wagon of death" - a truck piled high with decapitated heads, severed limbs, torn out arteries, scores of livers, hearts and kidneys and buckets of blood.

She said: "It was kind of impressive to see this thing roll in each day."

The 30-year-old Ukrainian model and actress is about to film The Thin Red Line director Terrence Malick's new romantic drama with Christian Bale and Javier Bardem, but will next appear in a Russian film about the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

She said: "I'm looking forward to the Malick film. I didn't really want to do another killer role. Before Centurion, I'd done this Israeli film, and it was another physical part, like Bond, involving guns and I played a killer. So when I saw the Centurion script I thought, 'Oh no, why me? I used to be such a sweet girl!' But I thought, you don't get to play mutes everyday."

The full interview in Esquire's May issue is on sale on Monday April 5.

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