Xenia Onatopp

Xenia Onatopp
James Bond character
Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp
First appearance	GoldenEye (1995)
Portrayed by	Famke Janssen (1995)
Voiced by	Jenya Lano (GoldenEye: Rogue Agent) Kate Magowan (GoldenEye 007)
In-universe information
Gender	Female
Affiliation	ex-Soviet Air Force Janus
Classification	Bond girl / Henchwoman

Xenia Zaragevna Onatopp is a fictional character and Bond girl in the James Bond film GoldenEye, played by actress Famke Janssen. She is a fighter pilot and assassin who crushes her enemies with her thighs, working for the renegade agent Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean).

Onatopp has appeared in a number of James Bond video games as a playable multiplayer character.

In the film[]

Onatopp, born in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, is a former officer and fighter pilot in the Soviet Air Force. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she joins the crime syndicate Janus, led by traitorous MI6 agent Alec Trevelyan. Early in the movie, Bond (Pierce Brosnan) gets into a car chase with her, meets her at a casino, and places her under surveillance.

She lures a Canadian admiral, Chuck Farrell (Billy J. Mitchell), onto a yacht moored off Monte Carlo and kills him during sex by crushing his ribs with her thighs, achieving orgasm in the process. Meanwhile, Trevelyan's henchman General Arkady Grigorovich Ourumov (Gottfried John) steals the dead admiral's NATO ID, granting him and Onatopp access to a Eurocopter Tiger aboard a French warship anchored off Monte Carlo.

Onatopp then hijacks the prototype Eurocopter Tiger by killing the two pilots. Later, she and Ourumov use the hijacked Tiger in an attack on the Severnaya satellite control center in central Siberia, where they steal the controller for the GoldenEye satellite weapon. During the attack, she fires an AKS-74U carbine around the control room, murdering all the military personnel and civilian technicians present; she is visibly aroused by killing dozens of people. She then appears as Bond's link to the Janus group. In a meeting arranged by Bond's dealings with Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane), a Russian arms dealer and former KGB agent, Onatopp arrives to meet Bond as he swims in a Turkish Bath. Initially sneaking around the pool, Bond discovers her presence and hurls her into the steam room. Onatopp attempts to seduce Bond, forcefully kissing him and coercing the agent to set down his weapon, before biting his lip, causing him to hurl her at the wall. Following a period of violent foreplay where Onatopp crushes Bond between her thighs, Bond finally draws his weapon on her and demands to be taken to Janus.

In her final encounter with Bond in Cuba, she ambushes him and Severnaya programmer Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco) by rappeling from a helicopter and begins torturing him between her legs. However, he is able to connect the rope she rappelled down to her safety harness, grabs her AK-74 rifle, and shoots down the helicopter with it. The result pulls her off him and sends her flying, screaming, into the forked trunk of a tree, with her safety harness crushing her to death; Bond quips, "She always did enjoy a good squeeze."

In video games[]

Her first appearance in a video game was in the 1997 video game adaptation of GoldenEye, GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64. She is with Trevelyan on the train stage of the game. If the player quickly shoots her after eliminating Ourumov, she will yell to Trevelyan that she is wounded and to wait up for her; this buys the player more time to escape from the train. She later reappears in the jungle stage. Similar to the film, she is killed in the jungles of Cuba in a firefight with Bond. Killing Onatopp is the only way for the player to dual-wield two different guns in the game without a complex series of button presses; she uses an RC-P90 and a grenade launcher at the same time.

In the James Bond game Nightfire, Onatopp also appears as a multiplayer character. She can be unlocked by a cheat on the cheats menu as Janus, the organization she works for in the movie.

She appeared in the spinoff Bond game GoldenEye: Rogue Agent where she works for Dr. Julius No and is Agent GoldenEye's alluring opponent. She is commander of No's army, which has taken over the Hoover Dam. She is killed after being thrown off of the Hoover Dam while fighting Goldeneye. In the game, her likeness was based on Famke Janssen but was voiced by actress Jenya Lano.

She appears in the GoldenEye remake as a former Russian general who served under Ouromov during the Russian invasion of Georgia. Her plot arc is significantly changed for the remake. She appears in the Nightclub level (where Bond first meets her) disguised as a waitress, and assassinates Valentin Zukovsky after he gives vital information about Janus to Bond - the man is framed for the murder of Zukovsky. She betrays and assassinates Ouromov in the train level in which she appears. During her final confrontation with Bond, she is lowered down to him from a helicopter and proceeds to engage in hand-to-hand combat with him; she is defeated when Bond launches a missile at her helicopter while she is strangling him, the helicopter crashing into a nearby gorge and dragging her down with it. She is voiced by and modeled after Kate Magowan.

Reception[]

Xenia Onatopp has appeared in several lists of the top 10 Bond Girls, including by Entertainment Weekly.^[1] Yahoo! Movies had her name included in the list of the best Bond girl names, even while calling it a "slightly-too-obvious pun."^[2] In 2015, The Telegraph suggested that "in the stolid Brosnan years, former Soviet fighter pilot Onatopp was a breath of fresh air."^[3] Paul Simpson argues that with Onatopp, the femme fatale made a "welcome reappearance" after the role had previously fallen out of fashion.^[4]

Anna Katherine Amacker and Donna Ashley Moore suggest that Onatopp is a "direct throwback to the earlier style of Bond girl, complete with an innuendo-laden name and a blatant sexuality."^[5] Robert A. Saunders suggests that she "personifies the hypersexualized archetype of the post-Soviet Russian woman."^[6]

References[]