The term “Bond girl” is at least four decades past its sell-by date. So, the “Bond woman”: hers remains, perhaps, the most narrowly prescribed role in movie history. Traditionally there have been two: a good-ish one, who is romanced and discarded by 007 early on, and a bad-ish, more intriguing one, who is eventually persuaded to join Her Majesty’s team and who often survives long enough to see the JAMES BOND WILL RETURN memo in the closing credits.
I recently had the opportunity to discuss the Bond woman—or girl; sexist nomenclature dies hard, alas, at least in conversation between two middle-aged men—with writer-director Sam Mendes, who was putting the finishing touches on the upcoming Spectre, the 24th “canonical” Bond film and Mendes’s second, following 2012’s Skyfall, the series’ most lucrative yet. Spectre is a bit of a departure in that it features three Bond women: the English actress Naomie Harris returning for her second go-round as Eve Moneypenny, former field agent now sitting behind the late Lois Maxwell’s old desk; the Italian actress Monica Bellucci (Irreversible and the two Matrix sequels); and the French actress Léa Seydoux (Inglourious Basterds, Blue Is the Warmest Color).
Bruce Handy: To what extent is the traditional “Bond girl” paradigm still in place? And how does either adhering to that or defying it affect the writing and casting of the movie?
Sam Mendes: Doing a Bond is an act of reverse engineering in a sense, because you understand early on that you have to have women, and they have to be different women. But to the extent that you’re trying to break with or conform to stereotypes in casting, once the roles are there on the page, you have to cast the best possible actresses available. Well, actually, I’ll tell you the one thought I did have was that in Daniel’s tenure there had never been a blonde woman, weirdly. Of course, I didn’t cast Léa because she was blonde, but you have to be aware of [that sort of thing]—that it’s part of a 50-year-old past.
I think [in] the Bond girl’s early days, there seems to have been a tradition that you discovered a new actress, and I haven’t conformed to that, particularly. But that’s partly because these days, with these movies, you can get your dream cast. I’m not sure you necessarily could in those days.
How did you come to cast Naomie Harris in Skyfall?
I saw her in a stage production of Frankenstein at the National Theater, which was directed by Danny Boyle, and then in a movie of Danny Boyle’s [28 Days Later]. Now it already feels as if she’s been playing Moneypenny for 10 years, even though we’d only made one movie together before the start of this. There was a sense of being a friend, actually, and in that regard I think she’s one of Bond’s few friends in the movie, and there’s still that unspoken question of “are they or aren’t they?,” which is kind of traditional in that part. But it’s tricky in the last movie, and it’s tricky because one doesn’t want to talk about it too schematically, but she was one of the two [Bond girls] in the last movie, but now she’s one of the MI-6 team.
She did a nice job in her action sequences in Skyfall. Does she get to do some more running around in the new movie, or is she deskbound like previous Moneypennys?
She does have a bit of opportunity to run around, but she’s on the MI-6 team, so she has to make way for another two. But Naomie is incredibly poised and direct and confident, and she’s very certain of her own mind. She’s just remarkably “on” all the time. It’s funny how her personality has morphed into the personality of the character somehow, in my mind, in the sense that she’s Bond’s friend, she’s always there for him, and she felt that way to me in the movie. I’m very, very fond of her. Also, you have to be quite big, I think, to know that you’re stepping aside and making space for two new women and not compete with that. And she didn’t for a second. She’s only there to tell the story.
Does either one of the two new actresses fall into the “bad Bond girl” role?
Not really. It’s so difficult to talk about these things before they’re released without giving anything away. They both are [“bad” in some sense], because the movie in some ways deals with—how can I put this delicately?—the question of: Can you escape, if you’ve done bad things, can you ever escape them on some level? Both the women are connected to assassins. One is married to one and the other is the daughter of an assassin. And as such, Bond is reflected back to himself through the prism of, in Monica’s case, her husband, and in Léa’s case, her father. And that’s a very deliberate thing.
I know it’s the cliché now to stoke up the roles of women in large commercial movies by saying “They’re so strong” and “They’re his equal” and stuff. It’s actually quite difficult to construct roles that actually conform to that. But in their case, I think the combination of the roles and their authority as actresses, and their relative maturity—and I don’t mean in years, I mean in experience—help, massively, the feeling that they’ve lived lives before meeting him, and they’re not simply adjuncts.
A lot has been written about Monica’s age [Editor’s note: At 51 she’s older than the average Bond “girl”], but the reality is I just thought it should be Monica Bellucci. I didn’t think it should be a 50-year-old woman. There aren’t many women like her. I’ll tell you a story. It’s a pretty unglamorous thing, shooting a movie, even at the best times, and especially when you’re doing a love scene and you have to rehearse it at five in the morning and everyone’s bleary-eyed. Monica turned up dressed in a parka coat, keeping herself warm in the London winter, and I thought, She’s catatonic. But her hair was done and she was quite presentable for five in the morning, and she said, “Should we rehearse?” And I said, “Let’s,” and she unzipped the coat and it dropped to the floor revealing her in an absolutely drop-dead black catsuit. And that was her at five in the morning, ready to rehearse. It felt like she came out ready to play, and it was exhilarating, her confidence and her sense of, I’ve waited a long time to be in a Bond movie and I’m going to enjoy every second of it. That really rubbed off.
She was the complete polar opposite of Léa, who, even though she desperately, I think, wanted to do the film, was kind of—well, the first time I met her I walked in and had agreed to meet her at Pinewood [studio, in London], and she was in a dressing room reading the script. I came in after she’d been there for a couple of hours to find her on Page 3 and fast asleep. [Laughs] And I said to her, “Are you enjoying it?” “It’s great!” And I teased her about that for the rest of the shoot. She’s a rough diamond. She’s herself at all times. She has no visible neurosis. She’s just a joyous, very warm, chaotic, unpolished . . . what’s the right word? If Monica is a sort of cat, Léa is a Labrador puppy. They have different energies, but both equally delightful.
When you say she has no visible neurosis, isn’t that somewhat rare in her profession?
I couldn’t possibly comment. [Laughs]
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