Quotes of the Day

Bond "wasn't even on my wish list, really," confesses Rosamund Pike. And why should it have been? Though the 23-year-old Londoner had performed on stage and the small screen, she had never appeared in a film. So as she sits on the set of the Ice Palace — the gigantic igloo and villain's lair in Die Another Day — you can understand why she's a little humbled, a little awestruck, at the spectacle around her: clouds of dry ice billowing up from the floor, waitresses whizzing past on rollerblades, bejeweled ladies and tuxedoed gentlemen sipping glasses of champagne (it's really ginger ale). Says Pike: "I feel like I'm just playing in a huge theme park."

Pike's character, Miranda Frost, likes to play games. Frost, an MI6 agent, goes undercover as a p.r. officer for the villain Gustav Graves. But she's a duplicitous creature whose favorite game seems to be toying with people's minds. Frost, says Pike, "can be quite catty." In the scene being filmed at the Ice Palace, she encounters Bond and Jinx, the other Bond Girl, played by Halle Berry, at a cocktail party that she has organized for Graves. "It's not often that the Bond Girls come up against each other face-to-face," Pike says. "I know I didn't invite Jinx. I know she's not supposed to be there."

Some would say the same about Pike, a graduate of Oxford who studied English literature and plays the cello and piano. Sometimes she even thinks so herself. "If someone had said a year ago, What do you see yourself doing? I would never ever have said a Bond film," she says. And when she was first called about the part, "I thought it was a joke."

The work has been anything but. Like Jinx, Frost is a new-style Bond Girl who does more than just flutter her eyebrows, respond to Bond's flirtation and look ravishing. This role required more physical training than any other part Pike has played before. "That's how you get into the body of someone," she says, and this particular someone was an Olympic gold medalist in fencing before MI6 recruited her. So she had weeks of lessons with Bob Anderson, formerly Britain's Olympic fencing coach.

Nothing and nobody could prepare her, though, to work opposite an Oscar winner. One of her first scenes had Frost meeting M, played by the formidable Judi Dench. "It was really hard," Pike recalls. "They didn't introduce us beforehand, and we didn't have a moment to speak before we had to go into the scene. So we met as characters." Of course she was nervous. Very nervous. "But I think you have to learn to make friends with your nerves," she says. "You have to."

You also have to learn to deal with the inevitable wave of publicity and media attention that comes with each and every 007 film. "There has been this great flurry of interest," Pike says. "People are asking: 'Who's this girl?'"

Perhaps most promisingly for her future, she has no illusions about how to answer that question. For just over two hours, she may be an onscreen temptress, one of the objects of Bond's desire. That'll look pretty good on her resumé, but she's not banking on the Bond Girl experience to lead to a flood of new offers. "I'm incredibly lucky to be the one who got this role. But I'm still an actress who is going to be looking for work again. This," she says, waving a hand at the set, "is fantasy." Once the job's done, it's back to reality.

• JEFF CHU
• TIME talks to Rosamund Pike, who plays MI6 agent Miranda Frost in Die Another Day