Daniel Craig in SPECTRE’s main titles
Here’s a quick summary of what we read (well, actually skimmed) so you don’t have to. After a while (say 15 minutes) it’s like the end of The Bridge On The River Kwai and thus, “Madness! Madness!”
The drive for a female James Bond: American actress Gillian Anderson, currently starring in a theatrical production of A Streetcar Named Desire, went to Twitter on May 21 to post some fan art of her playing a female 007.
“It’s Bond. Jane Bond,” she wrote. “Thanks for all the votes! (And sorry, don’t know who made poster but I love it!) #NextBond.”
Naturally, various websites wrote this up, including Time magazine, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post.
Around the same time, actress Priyanka Chopra have a magazine interview where she said she wants to play Bond.
This was chronicled in, among other places the Vulture entertainment news website (part of New York magazine), The Indian Express at least 160 others, according to a Google search.
Evidently, if you’re an actor with sufficient credits and a fan base willing to tweet up a storm, you, too, can have a story written about yourself as a potental James Bond.
In the drive for clicks, the tabloid New York Post decided to push back against the idea with an article titled “Why a Woman Can’t Play James Bond.”
Finally, a sane voice, you might conclude. However, this article isn’t comfort food for traditional 007 fans. Here’s how it ends:
So please, Hollywood, write more spy movies and TV shows for women. After all, the first two seasons of Jennifer Garner’s “Alias” were more exciting and creative than any James Bond movie since “Goldeneye.” Or have a woman play a gender-neutral character like the driving force of “Mission Impossible.” The less Tom Cruise, the better.
But don’t rely on a tired 54-year-old franchise to drive home your point. Your only aim should be making a spy movie that kicks James Bond’s ass.
Pretend you’re the casting director: The U.K. tabloid Daily Mail helped ramp up #NextBond fever last week with a story saying Daniel Craig had definitely quit the role despite lack of official confirmation.
The publication’s sister paper, The Mail on Sunday, decided to stir things up more by having a “Bond-off” about potential successors. It was primarily an exercise in showing off its staff’s expertise in Photoshop, by putting the heads of the usual suspects atop the bodies of Craig and previous 007 actors.
“Across the pond,” another tabloid, New York’s Daily News, did a variation on the same idea, albeit with no showing off of Photoshop skills.
Filed under: James Bond Films | Tagged: Bond 25, Daily Mail, Gillian Anderson, Mail on Sunday, New York Daily News, New York Post, Priyanka Chopra |
The Spy Command 
I’m a pragmatic liberal (that’s right, a pragmatic liberal), and even I’m getting tired of this kind of thing. I wish that the people (mainly, IMHO,young millennial ladies who write blogs and then got hired by magazines and newspapers to write their stuff, especially at websites like this one) who push this kind of thing would try to see if they can create their own fictitious characters rather than come in and try to change the gender of established ones (if two guys working at Disney were able to come up with a certain teenage spy-like adventurer, these ladies could sit their asses down at their computers and create their own female adventurer characters, then get the concept sold to a company to bring it to the big/small screen-or even as a comic book character.) It might be hard to do, but it’d be better than constantly altering established, time-honored characters just for the heck of it (this guy’s universe is a good example; he’s created a ton of fictitious characters, many of them female, and he works at a minimum wage job to pay for the tools he needs to create said characters!)
Heck, the few times I’ve played DC Universe Online, I’ve created female characters (when I played it on the PlayStation 3 and more recently on the Xbox One) and I was able to create those characters out of my own imagination (one of them is a small lady with atomic powers.) Again, it should not be too hard to come up with a female spy similar to James Bond, and have her do her thing, but the people pushing this don’t seem to have the gumption to accomplish this on their own.