The marvels of 'X-Men' girl named Angel

You'll believe a girl can fly. And projectile-vomit acid fireballs.

Such are the powers of Angel Salvadore, the Marvel Comics mutant played by Zoë Kravitz in "X-Men: First Class," which opens Friday. Unlike the angelically winged, longtime X-Man called Angel, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963's "The X-Men" #1, this character bowed in a 2001 comic as an abused 14-year-old with insect wings and the aforementioned acidic projectile.

"Every time I say that , I think there must be a better way to put it, but I can't figure out how!" Kravitz says with a giggly laugh. The laughter makes for a stark contrast to the dour roles she has previously played: a teenage prostitute in Jodie Foster's vigilante film "The Brave One" (2007), a grief-counseling addict in the dead-child drama "The Greatest" (2009), a punky, attitudinal girl-band singer in a 2011 arc of the series "Californication."

"That's why they call it acting, my friend!" responds the 22-year-old daughter of singer Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet, who moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after a leaving her drama studies at SUNY Purchase after a year to do movies. "I think actors are attracted to things that are very different from themselves."

A CRUCIAL ROLE She couldn't have gotten more different that Angel, who in Matthew Vaughn's ensemble movie is an older teen working as a stripper in 1962 when mutants Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) recruit her for a team of superpowered youngsters during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In that capacity she gets to fly and teleport. But she also has to make one of the most critical moral choices in an adult-themed movie with more than its share.

That choice involves the villainous Sebastian Shaw, played by Kevin Bacon -- who despite the classically trained credentials of McAvoy and Fassbender was the genuine movie star in all the young actors' eyes.

"All of us would freak!" Kravitz remembers. "He would come and go" as needed for his shooting days, "and we'd be like, 'Dude, Kevin Bacon's here!' We're a bunch of newcomers and he'd walk up and we'd be, like, 'Oh my God!' And then, like, the whole Kevin Bacon thing completely disappeared because he's so normal and down-to-earth. He totally hung out with us. It was amazing!"

FLYING HIGH Equally amazing for her was doing wirework flying that's generally the province of stuntmen. "We had the same stunt team who did 'Inception' and they really knew what they were doing," she said.

So did Kravitz soon enough. While she and the other actors did shoot green-screen, in which they were filmed under controlled conditions in a studio with backgrounds digitally added later, "some of it was also on-set," she says, "where they set up these wires and throw you around the room. It's a strain on your body to hold yourself up in the air all that time; after a while the harness can be a little uncomfortable -- it's tight and you're hanging. But it's fun, not scary."

That proved especially so on location at the Georgia beach subbing for Cuba. "They had it set up so that I could actually fly over the beach," she said. "They set up four very big pillars and I was able to go from one side of the beach to the other. I forgot to ask how many feet up I was, but it was very high. It's like a roller coaster, you're gong so fast. You only get an opportunity like this once."

Or maybe not, because 20th Century Fox has envisioned "First Class" as part of a trilogy. So Angel -- and Kravitz -- may get to fly again.