Kate Upton proves (yet again) that she can do high fashion just as well as Sports Illustrated on the cover of UK Vogue’s June edition. The model, now at the beginning of her acting career looks gorgeous and sun-kissed on the cover, shot by Mario Testino. The Upton/Testino/Vogue collaboration is a familiar one, but once again, it works. She is photographed in a vintage bikini, channeling her inner 50s pinup. Protographers and stylists tend to like that aesthetic on the SI covergirl, probably because she has the body type to pull it off.

Kate Upton
Upton's figure is more of a barrier in film than in modelling.

Upton’s feature interview, however, is where things really get interesting. The 21-year-old woman, widely considered the curviest non-plus size supermodel at the moment, recalls that it was precisely her body that gave her trouble booking auditions. Her first role is as that of a perpetually bikini-clad gigglebox in the Cameron Diaz vehicle The Other Woman. The movie was generally ill-received by critics and doesn’t really provide a lot of opportunities for Upton to flex her hypothetical acting muscles. Even so, it’s a role she had to fight for, the model recalls.

Kate Upton
Apparently Upton doesn't take no for an answer.

"It's weird that in the press they'll be like, your biggest fight was with the industry and the designers, and I'm like, no, my biggest fight was with my agents, trying to get them to sign me into the castings," Upton says in an interview with Vogue contributing editor Alexa Chung. "I thought, how I'm going to come out of this will be an example for girls."

Referencing her signature look, she says: "I always thought Marilyn was so beautiful and iconic, it was amazing to even be mentioned in the same sentence as her," she tells Chung. "But I feel like nowadays it's easy to be genuine and show your personality, whereas I don't think Marilyn had that opportunity. And clearly she had a dark side, and I don't have that."

Read more of the interview in the upcoming issue of Vogue UK.

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Kate Upton
Kate has been rocking a more sophisticated look of late.