Double Agents

It’s not the bikini that’s bothering Halle Berry. She has, goodness knows, worn a lot less in front of the camera. It’s not the teeth-chatteringly chilly brine she’s been dipping in all day, either, or the slimy clumps of seaweed that keep slithering all over her skin and getting into her hair. It’s not even the hundreds of shrieking fans and paparazzi — ”Ha-leee!” — who have flocked to a remote beach in southern Spain on this April afternoon to gawk as she wades from the waves to make one of the biggest splashes in a Bond movie since Ursula Andress stepped out of the ocean wearing a similar two-piece some 40 years earlier.

No, what’s bugging Berry right now is the lack of wiggle in her walk.

”The only direction I was given was ‘Be sexy,”’ she complains later, re-creating the scene. ”What does that mean? I’m supposed to walk out of the surf and onto the beach and somehow be sexy about it. How am I supposed to walk sexy? One guy told me I looked like I was giving myself a hip displacement.”

She’ll get the hang of it eventually. She is, after all, an Oscar-winning actress — the very first to wear a bathing suit in a James Bond movie. But being sexy isn’t the only mission Berry could accomplish in Die Another Day. As Jinx, a smart-mouthed, catsuit-clad American spy every bit as indestructible as Agent 007 himself, she may pull off something not even Andress did: She might steal the movie.

Of course, Pierce Brosnan is the star of the film. And in his fourth outing as Bond, he shows a fallibility rarely seen before (even spending part of the movie in a North Korean prison camp, where Bond is beaten, tortured, and ends up looking like a roadie for ZZ Top). But check out the film’s marketing campaign and you’ll see something unprecedented for a Bond picture: two stars. In virtually every billboard, poster, trailer, and TV spot, Berry’s face is featured just as prominently as Brosnan’s.

”She’s prominent in the film, too,” says Chris McGurk, vice chairman and COO of MGM, the series’ longtime home. ”She’s a totally new type of Bond girl. She’s as close to a female Bond as has ever been written into the series.” In fact, MGM is so convinced it’s found a girl Bond in this new Bond girl that the studio is dangling something in front of Berry almost as priceless as that golden statue she won last March: an action franchise all her own. Among the many properties the studio is developing for her is a spin-off movie featuring Jinx.

But first, Berry will have to learn to walk sexy — which she’s about to try one more time. With the cameras rolling, she takes another dunk and emerges from the water in a shimmering spray. Her slo-mo hair flip couldn’t be more sensual. Her swan-like glide to the shore couldn’t be more graceful. The wiggle in her walk couldn’t be sexier.

And that big glob of seaweed dangling from her chin is a nice touch too.

Let’s not talk about James Bond,” says James Bond. ”Let’s talk about something else. Anything else. Anything at all.”