Léa Seydoux Is Maxim’s November 2015 Cover Girl

The ravishing French beauty has a fling with 007, but please don’t call her a Bond girl.

It was hardly a typical introduction for a would-be Hollywood superstar, but the first time most of us laid eyes on Léa Seydoux, her hair was cropped and dyed blue and she was playing a lesbian art student with a taste for Sartre and strawberry milk.

Unexpectedly, that French-language indie film, Blue Is the Warmest Color, became a global hit. (Maybe it had something to do with the seven-minute sex scene, which the New York Times deemed “longer and more literal than anything you are likely to encounter outside of pornography.”) In any case, Seydoux was soon the hottest French export since Champagne. And a few more art films later, she has landed the female lead in this November’s Spectre. Technically, she’s a “Bond girl”—a charter member of that lithe, busty cinematic sisterhood (often named with extremely heavy-handed innuendo) who turn up as eye candy in the long-running spy franchise, relegated to playing second fiddle to 007.

Or they used to be.

Read the exclusive interview with Léa Seydoux  in Maxim‘s VELOCITY Issue, on newsstands now, here and check out  scenes from our sultry photo shoot with Bond’s newest femme fatale below.