Rachel Weisz Doesn’t Want a Female James Bond: “Women Should Get Their Own Stories”
Over the past several years, actresses like Gillian Anderson,Priyanka Chopra, and Emilia Clarke have all thrown their hats into the ring to play James Bond, the eternal British spy. The king of espionage has been played by white men since his very first film—and though that’s how he was envisioned in Ian Fleming’s original series, the franchise has evolved to a point where it only seems right to shake things up. Even Idris Elba, the Bond of the people’s hearts, has declared that he wants the next 007 film to star a woman.
Of course, classic Bond fans aren’t all that interested in switching up the formula just yet—and now, a superstar actress has joined their ranks: Rachel Weisz, the Academy Award winner who also happens to be married to current Bond star Daniel Craig.
The actress told The Telegraph that she is not into the idea of a female Bond (JaneBond?), because Fleming “devoted an awful lot of time to writing this particular character, who is particularly male and relates in a particular way to women.”
“Why not create your own story rather than jumping onto the shoulders and being compared to all those other male predecessors?” she continued. “Women are really fascinating and interesting, and should get their own stories.”
Well, she’s not wrong! Women certainly deserve to anchor franchises on the same scale as Bond. But in a world where we still don’t even have a Black Widow movie, those franchises are few and far between—especially in a blockbuster atmosphere that’s getting more and more reluctant to take a chance on a story without a built-in audience. Every once in a while, a new project with potential will pop up—take Angelina Jolie’s Salt or Charlize Theron’s Atomic Blonde—but they never take off on a Bond-level scale.
Plus, there’s something enticing about expanding the definition of who James Bond specifically is. The character has also come to represent a sort of British ideal—a suave lover, dresser, and thinker who can elegantly swerve past any obstacle with one hand on the steering wheel of a clean Aston Martin, the other gripping a crisp martini (you know how he takes it). And with the entertainment world constantly serving up homogenous stories about heroic white guys, it’s easy to understand why audiences want to project change onto Bond, arguably Britain’s biggest and most beloved film series—Queen Elizabeth II-approved and all.
If changing Bond himself to a woman still seems like a bridge too far, then why not launch a Bond spin-off series about a female spy? Or a stand-alone movie featuring any number of the fabulous women we’ve seen pop up in past Bond films? Marvel has built a billion-dollar franchise around characters less famous, initially, than figures like Spider-Man; why couldn’t the world of Bond take the same approach? Charlize Theron is just waiting for the call.