The actor who refused to ruin their career by being a ‘Bond girl’: “I didn’t want to do it”
With Denis Villeneuve at the helm of the next instalment in the never-ending franchise, it’s highly unlikely that whoever ends up playing the female lead in the next James Bond movie will bear many similarities to the archetypal ‘Bond girls’ of the past.
The Daniel Craig era made a mostly concerted shift away from the tropes and trappings that had defined 007’s onscreen paramours for decades, with the notable exception of Gemma Arterton’s Strawberry Fields, a role the actor admitted she was initially thrilled to get before eventually souring on it completely.
For the most part, the majority of the women who played prominent roles in Craig’s five-film tenure weren’t presented as one-dimensional eye candy or notches on a bedpost, particularly Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann, and Lashana Lynch’s Nomi, but it was still Bond at the end of the day.
There are certain things the secret agent is expected to do in every one of his big-screen adventures; he’ll drink a shaken-not-stirred martini, look impeccable in a tuxedo, utilise a string of fanciful gadgets, get at least one of the girls, defeat the villain, and save the day. That’s the way it’s been for decades, and even though Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale promised a reinvention, Sienna Miller wasn’t interested.
It’s easy to see why she was under consideration; Miller had been pegged as one of British cinema’s potential stars of the future, and she’d co-starred with Craig in Layer Cake, which was the performance that convinced Eon Productions he was exactly the man they were looking for to take on the coveted role.
They generated plenty of chemistry in Matthew Vaughn’s feature-length directorial debut, and it would have been twice as ironic had the obsessive 007 fan’s first film given Casino Royale both of its top-billed stars in a movie he was supposed to direct, but didn’t. And yet, it wasn’t to be, with Miller admitting that she didn’t want to fall victim to the ‘Bond girl’ curse.
“It would have been fun, but I didn’t want to do it,” she confessed. “It would have been great to work with Daniel again, though, because he is such a brilliant actor, and I’m not surprised at all that he has made such a success of the Bond role.” That was a diplomatic answer, but her comments elsewhere suggested that she was wary of the potential pitfalls that come with being one of Bond’s conquests.
“I don’t think it’s the right time for me to be a ‘Bond girl,'” she’d previously acknowledged. “It may undo all the hard work I have been doing this year.” There’s no need to read between the lines, with Miller basically saying, ‘I want to be taken seriously as an actor, and being a ‘Bond girl’ isn’t the way to do it’.
Ironically, Green initially turned it down, too, until the character was rewritten to her satisfaction, turning the tables on Craig by saying, “He is the ‘Bond girl’, not me. He’s the one who comes out of the sea with his top off.'”
Miller’s career didn’t quite end up reaching the heights predicted in the early 2000s, and she did eventually make her blockbuster debut several years later… in Stephen Sommers’ GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
