Comment on James Bond should stay white and male, says casting chief
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I’m all for staying with the essence of a character, and there’s definitely arguments to be made that a cishet white male is fundamental to the original Bond from the books. Because that is true; a spy in that setting that isn’t a white male that can at least pretend to be hetero is going to be so unusual in the locations Bond typically works in that he’d never be able to be covert.
That being said, it has been a very minor portion of the movies that sticks with any kind of realism. The Daniel Craig movies did to a degree, and the earliest ones were fairly close to the books.
But they keep him in modern times, and have for decades now. In this world, trying to argue that Bond has to be exactly like the books, or even like any given era of the movies is silly. There’s absolutely no reason Bond couldn’t be other than white. It would change aspects of what stories can be told (can’t send a black Bond into a Russian military base undercover and expect it to be believable, as an example), but the real defining aspect of Bond isn’t race, or gender. It’s nationality.
Bond is British. Change that and you fuck the story up. That’s about the only thing you can’t change without breaking the scenario. You can even change his Eton going background, what military branch he served in, any of the secondary character building points and still have him be Bond, as long as he’s still British.
That goes for making him her, as well. It would come with its own set of difficulties to build a story for; but a female Bond, a female British spy is well within bounds of the concept. It would change the character more, but not so far as to insult the spirit of the history of the character.
Again, nothing wrong with sticking to the spirit of a character, which includes social factors like race, gender, religion, sexual orientation is fine. But you can’t pretend that Bond in specific has always stayed true to that spirit over the decades of movies.
I will add that it’s really about casting more than anything else. Most fans would have been on board with Ildris Elba because the man is a fantastic actor and would have been perfect for the role when his name was first circulating. So if they wanted to have a non traditional Bond, they have to find the right actor. Hell, it isn’t easy to cast Bond at all
tenebrisnox@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Bond wasn’t British until Connery played the role. In the novels he was English and had an incipid racist dislike of the Scots and Welsh. He was also a misogynist and a homohobe. He was also pretty much a cowardly assassin. He was supposed to look like the American songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. Initially the tv series Danger Man was going to be an Ian Fleming-weitten Bond TV series at the end of the 1950s with Patrick McGoohan as Bond until McGoohan seemed to politically object to playing the character. Bond’s characterisation has always altered. (A good book to read about all this is John Higgs’ excellent Love and Let Die.)
Today Bond has the ability to be reshaped by the current dominant culture to try and reflect how the UK sees itself. There’s no surprise that because we struggle to define what British is, defining a contemporary Bond is equally difficult. Becomes part of the culture wars.
A solution (possibly cop-out) I’d like to see is for a new Bond movie (or TV series) to be set immediately after World War Two and present him in much the way he’s depicted in the Casino Royale and Live and Let Die novels: late thirties, scar across his cheek, cruel mouth, skin grafts and all. I thought the recent Ripley adaptation was good and they way I’d like to see Bond go.