More proof, not that it was needed, that asking a celebrity about the Bond franchise is an oven-ready route to going viral — Variety’s recent interview with Sydney Sweeney put the Euphoria star into all kinds of fluster. When the journalist brought up rumours that Sweeney was being lined up as a Bond girl, she replied: “I can’t. [Seven-second pause.] I don’t know. [Ten-second pause.] To be honest, I don’t know all the Bond rumours, but I’ve always been a huge fan of the franchise, and I’m excited and curious to see what they do with it.”
Such a strangulated response will add fuel to the 007 bin fire, especially given what Sweeney said next. Asked if she would be interested in being a Bond girl, she composed herself and said: “Depends on the script. I think I’d have more fun as James Bond.” She certainly would. Flooring Aston Martins, abseiling off skyscrapers and rolling out suggestive one-liners versus being seduced by a middle-aged psychopath and quite possibly murdered by his megalomaniac nemesis — it’s not much of a contest, is it?
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We are used to seeing female spies on our screens these days, from Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh in the Marvel movies to Rebecca Ferguson in the Mission: Impossible franchise and a bruising Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde. The role of women in Bond is evolving too, with Ana de Armas’s agent Paloma and Lashana Lynch’s next-generation 007 comprehensively pilfering No Time to Die from Daniel Craig. The crowning moment came when Paloma responded to Bond’s sexual overtures by screwing up her nose and going, “Eurgh.”
Part of Sweeney must be happy that people are talking about something other than her allegedly eugenics-adjacent ad for American Eagle. She is an underrated actress who was excellent in the recent thriller Echo Valley and you could see her as a nuanced, take-no-crap Bond woman. Her chances of actually taking over from Craig, though, are about the same as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s. In 2020 the producer Barbara Broccoli said 007 will remain a man. True, she’s no longer at the head of the franchise and there has been no official confirmation that the new Bond will be male from Denis Villeneuve, the Dune director in the hot seat for the next film, nor Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders creator who is writing it. Yet it would be a surprise of geopolitical proportions to see a woman play a character who has performative misogyny and emotional constipation in his DNA.