Berenice Marlohe’s exotic look deemed unfit for movies before `Skyfall`

London: Berenice Marlohe, the new Bond girl in ‘Skyfall,’ has revealed that she had just two auditions in a year before landing the coveted film role opposite Daniel Craig.

The 33-year-old French actress said that she spent years in Paris struggling to make it to the big screen, with agents constantly telling her that she had the wrong look. Marlohe, who has mixed French, Chinese and Cambodian ancestry, was turned down for countless roles before director Sam Mendes saw her potential. Marlohe said that Mendes told her that she was exactly what he imagined Bond girl Severine would look like before casting her in ‘Skyfall.’ “Even people who saw me in acting workshops and wanted to introduce me to people – when those people considered my picture, they said, ‘No, she will never work in France’. I was not in the mould,” the a leading daily has quoted her as telling a magazine. “Then Mendes told me when he first imagined the role, he imagined someone looking like me. So I was very happy,” she said. Mendes, who won an Oscar for ‘American Beauty,’ said: “She has that thing that many of the classic Bond girls have, which is that she’s a real woman with a mature sexuality. But also there’s a real mystery to her. “She has this Asian heritage which for us in the story – her part of it takes place in Shanghai, Macau and out in the South China Sea – was perfect. “In some lights she’s Western, in some lights she’s very exotic,” she added. ANI