Xenia Onatopp

Lore & Background

Born in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, Xenia Onatopp is a former officer and fighter pilot in the Soviet Air Force. She enjoys playing baccarat and smoking cigars. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she joins the crime syndicate Janus, led by traitorous MI6 agent Alec Trevelyan. James Bond first encounters Onatopp when he gets into a car chase with her.

He then meets her at a casino and places her under surveillance. Onatopp lures a Canadian admiral, Chuck Farrell, onto a yacht moored off Monte Carlo and kills him during a sex honey trapping, by crushing his ribs with her thighs, achieving orgasm in the process. Meanwhile, Trevelyan's henchman General Arkady Grigorovich Ourumov steals the dead admiral's NATO ID and uniform, granting him and Onatopp access to a prototype EMP-hardened Eurocopter Tiger aboard a French warship anchored off Monte Carlo.

Onatopp then hijacks the helicopter by killing the two pilots, Captain Bernard Jaubert and Lieutenant François Brouse. 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 kills all the military personnel and civilian technicians present, and is visibly aroused by the killing. She then appears as Bond's link to the Janus group.

In a meeting arranged, by Bond's dealings, with Valentin Zukovsky, a Russian arms dealer and former KGB agent, Onatopp arrives to meet Bond as he swims in a Turkish Bath. The two indulge in aggressive foreplay where Onatopp attempts to crush Bond between her thighs, after which he finally draws his Walther PPK on her and demands to be taken to Janus. In Onatopp's final encounter with Bond in Cuba, she ambushes him and Severnaya programmer Natalya Simonova by rappeling from a helicopter, and again attempts to crush him between her legs.

Bond uses her assault rifle to damage the helicopter, entangling her rope, which pulls her off him, crushing her to death against a tree trunk. Regarding Onatopp for a moment, Bond quips, "she always did enjoy a good squeeze".

Reader's Guide

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". Robert A. Saunders suggests that she "personifies the hypersexualized archetype of the post-Soviet Russian woman". Helena Bassil-Morosow suggests that Onatopp is "visually coded as a stereotypical dominatrix: dark hair, bright red lipstick, smoky eyeshadow and sharply defined eyebrows", while Monica Germanà suggests that "Xenia's glamour encapsulates the sadistic quality of her excessive appetite".

Bassil-Morosow goes on to note that Onatopp "also sees violence as a broadly defined sexual act in which she gets to dominate and ultimately decide people's fates", and argues that she "poses a threat to Bond's status as a dominant male as she consistently outdoes him in all his favourite activities: driving, killing, risk-taking and having sex with multiple partners". In this way, she "has to be eventually killed by him because not only is she ruthless and unstoppable but also metaphorically as a punishment for refusing to admire him".

Bassil-Morosow concludes that "Onatopp's character, masculinised, independent, domineering and sexually liberated, can be read as a bitter parody of feminism." Xenia Onatopp has appeared in several lists of the top 10 Bond girls, including by Entertainment Weekly. Yahoo! Movies had her name included in the list of the best Bond girl names, even while calling it a "slightly-too-obvious pun".

In 2015, The Telegraph suggested that "in the stolid Brosnan years, former Soviet fighter pilot Onatopp was a breath of fresh air". Paul Simpson argues that with Onatopp, the femme fatale made a "welcome reappearance" after the role had previously fallen out of fashion.

Did You Know?

• In the 1997 GoldenEye 007 game, killing Onatopp is the only way to dual-wield two different guns without a complex series of button presses.
• In the GoldenEye remake, Onatopp is voiced by and modeled after Kate Magowan, not Famke Janssen.