It's not a surprise that Halle Berry was chosen to be the latest Bond girl. She's got the looks, and she's also got an Academy Award under her belt, making her one of the most accomplished Bond women to date. As the tough Jinx in "Die Another Day," Halle shows us that she's a girl who can hold her own, even in the most unstable predicaments.

Last year, you thought you were going to be the Bond villain. Were you disappointed to be a heroine? No, I was actually pleasantly surprised and happy that it took a change. I mean, I would have been happy to play the villain, but that was one of the early, early drafts. She was still as strong and she was still an assassin, she just wasn't on the same side, so I was happy when they made the switch to make her on the same side as Bond.

Did you watch the old Bond movies? Not really. I had seen about 10 of them over the years. The only one I went back to look at was Ursula Andress for Dr. No just because they wanted me to totally do exactly what she did initially. So, I went back and I watched and then I saw and I looked and I said okay. But, the other ones, no.

What style of fighting did you learn? I didn't learn any special style. I just learned how to work with knives and do combat training. I learned how to shoot and fire a gun, repel from wires, climb walls.

How did you learn the fight choreography? They went as well as it can go when two people don't know what the hell they're doing with knives. It took us some time to get it right, because we just learned this in 30 days. So, we're real patient with each other and we had good doubles and good stunt women that helped us and taught us how to be safe and how to do it and make it look realistic. But I also wanted it to look like an out and out fight too. We didn't want to look so professional. We wanted it to have some element of rawness and we didn't want it to look so rehearsed and so choreographed.

Were there any mishaps with any stuff? There's that one scene, when [a villain] does the knife, there's one time where she did it and then at the end of the scene, everybody goes, "Oh, great take." I thought, "Yeah, that's because she really cut me." And I think that's the take they used in the movie because I had a line from there to there where it really just [slice noise].

How about when you were drowning? Freezing. But not as cold as [it could have been] because I had on a suit, so the water did not touch my skin directly but it was freezing. It was not as cold as, of course we had to act it, but it wasn't heated in any way.

What about your eye injury? Yeah, that was really nothing. In movies, if you get a paper cut on these big action movies, you have to see a doctor for insurance purposes. So, I had to go to a doctor and a newspaper picked up on it and made it something it wasn't. It was like off and running.

What was your working relationship with Pierce Brosnan? He was just very gracious and very much the kind of guy that set a positive tone for making the movie. Being Bond and being Pierce, the head of it all, he had the power to set the tone and he made it very comfortable for the new kids, Rosamund, Toby and Rick. He made it really easy for us to be these new kids. When it was our moment to have a moment with him, he was really generous and he wanted us all to have our little five minutes.

Would you be interested in your own series as Jinx? Jane Bond? Jinx Bond? If they ask me, honestly, if I could play Jinx and continue on with this character, I really love her, all that she embodies, I would do it in a heartbeat. I would just have to somehow work it out. And I love them. I love working for them. I hadn't worked for a company and two people that were more supportive. Just the moviemaking in general, but I got nominated on their show and they changed their schedule probably 100 times so that I could come back to L.A., go to New York, do an interview.