The ‘Bond girl’ forced to audition twice for the same role: “You need to sex it up”
Once upon a time, acting ability had absolutely nothing to do with being hired to play a female character in a James Bond movie. It was all about aesthetics, which saw one actor sent away from their audition and asked to return, except this time dressed more provocatively.
While it sounds like something that would have happened during the Sean Connery, George Lazenby, or Roger Moore years, this happened in the late 1980s, when 007 was edging closer to modernity with Timothy Dalton in the lead role, albeit without fully casting off the shackles of its objectifying past.
Common sense would suggest that the one thing required to succeed in a casting call is to deliver a convincing performance in front of the people doing the hiring, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, one reading led to another reading, where the actor did the same thing the second time around, except in a short dress, which landed them the part.
It might sound like the sort of behind-the-scenes tale that came from a performer who regretted their one-and-done stint as the latest notch on Bond’s bedpost, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, Carey Lowell was nothing but complimentary of the circumstances that saw her playing Pam Bouvier in Licence to Kill.
“I was told it was a biker chick in a biker bar,” she told Print, with the character ultimately depicted as a former military pilot and DEA informant in the film. “I showed up in my leather biker jacket and my jeans and read the lines, and the casting director, Janet Hirshenson, said, ‘This is a Bond film. This is for a Bond girl. You look nothing like the part. You need to sex it up.'”
Apparently, the quality of her audition was irrelevant, since Lowell was told, “You can come back on Monday, but wear something different, and I’ll let you have another shot at it.” She was far from disheartened, though, adding that it was “very kind” of Hirshenson to offer constructive criticism.
“I went out that weekend to the mall, and I found the trashiest pink lame zip-up, like a halter dress,” the actor elaborated. “Like, if I had pulled the zipper down, it would’ve come off, and it was short.” Again, it had fuck all with how she read the lines or portrayed the character, but it evidently worked.
“I just went in there, and I did the same thing in this pink halter dress, and I got the part,” Lowell recalled. It’s always been an appearance-based industry, something Bond has regularly been guilty of, but that doesn’t make it any less weird that she’d performed the exact same audition twice, and the one that got her hired was the one where she wore the “trashiest” outfit she could find.
That’s the way things were back then, not that Lowell regretted a thing. “The Broccoli family were so lovely, and Cubby was alive then, and his daughter, Barbara Broccoli, who was the producer, was fantastic,” the actor explained. “It felt like being part of a family.” Still, it was a family that wouldn’t let anyone into the party unless they were dressed in a skimpier outfit than they wore the first time they were invited.
