Super Krupa

The planet's premier swimsuit model has the world on a string bikini

In this great wide world there are models and there are swimsuit models, and then there is Joanna Krupa. Ladies and gentlemen, behold the state of the art.

At 24, Krupa is at an age when a very few sublimely gifted people find that all doors open wide for them. She is blonde, blue-eyed, tall enough to look down on most of her fellow inhabitants of Earth and otherwise endowed with such an array of attractions that seldom must she want for companionship. Indeed, this has posed something of a problem, causing poor Joanna to be misunderstood as a flirt. "I mean, I don't think I did it intentionally," she says breezily. "I was just really friendly, and guys took it the wrong way. I tried not to hurt people's feelings, so if they'd ask me out I'd say I had a boyfriend even when I didn't. It was just easier to lie."

Those days of flirting and fibbing are over, Joanna says, now that she has a real boyfriend, actor Jensen Ackles (Smallville, Dawson's Creek), who is himself no slouch in the blond and tall departments. They've been going out for more than 15 months, and she is pretty gaga over him, seemingly for good reason. "He's a wonderful person, really laid-back, just a normal guy and not into the whole Hollywood scene with his head up his butt," she says. "And every time I have an orgasm with him it's amazing!" Now, there's an image to summon discreetly the next time your aunt starts discussing her Hummel figurines.

Sadly, Ackles is not with her today on her modeling shoot, so she has to make do with other, more pedestrian amazements. Lounging in her hotel on southern California's Catalina Island, a sweatshirt hanging off her shoulders Flashdance style, she flips through the channels on the television, checks her e-mail and does her best to extol the virtues of her latest acting job. Joanna, as it turns out, has copped the female lead in the chop-socky flick Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon, opposite David Carradine, Carmen Electra and martial arts star Mickey Hardt. "In the movie my sister and I are traveling to Guam and I run into this jade dragon that's worth a lot of money, but it belongs to the Japanese mafia," she summarizes. "So basically the whole thing is about this stupid jade dragon, and the Japanese mafia is after it." Perhaps that description seems a tad nonchalant for someone who's embarking on a career thousands pine for in vain, but Joanna doesn't appear terribly impressed with the Hollywood scene. She says she once met Jack Nicholson at a Nicolas Cage party, at which "he seemed like a grumpy old man. I don't remember if he even said hi." (Jack, if you're listening, you've got to take off the sunglasses sometimes. Look what you're missing!)

The journey to get to a Nicolas Cage party began in Poland, where she was born. Her family moved to Chicago when she was a tot and lived in the Polish community there. At the age of 13 she saw an ad for the Barbizon school of modeling, begged her mom to let her attend, watched $10,000 go down the tubes with no results, enrolled at a two-year community college, left for L.A. when she was 19, got modeling gigs for Yamaha, Skechers and Izod, and eventually became a minor but nonetheless memorable face on quite a few television comedy shows, including Just Shoot Me! ("David Spade was a really friendly guy"), Son of the Beach ("It was fun. It was a chilly day") and The Man Show. Actually, she spent an entire season on The Man Show, as one of the bouncing-boob Juggy dancers, and was not enthralled by the experience. "It was fun," she says, "but if I had to go back, I definitely wouldn't do it again. It was a waste of my time."

With our time together growing short, we ferret out a few more morsels of Krupa lore. She's a junk-food junkie ("Foodwise, I love to eat"), she says, and cops to being a nail biter. When asked which of her features she thinks men find most attractive, she talks about her eyes and her lips, which she describes, accurately, as "nice and plump." True enough, but readers should feel free to make their own selection.

Outside her window some sailboats are drifting past. "What do you see when you stand in front of a mirror?" we ask.

"I don't know," she says remotely. "It's hard to say." And off she goes, tall, blonde and 24, ready to model the hell out of some lucky bikini, our last stupidly obvious question fading from her ears.

See more of Joanna at cyber.playboy.com.