The ‘Bond girl’ who became a laughing stock: “It broke my heart that people were making fun of me”
As a franchise that’s obligated to move with the times to avoid becoming an outdated and irrelevant relic, it’s been a while since the James Bond movies have been forced to contend with the problems that repeatedly reared their heads during the early years.
Of course, that’s to be expected when each instalment in the long-running series is a product of its time, and it would be an understatement to say some things that were deemed perfectly acceptable in the 1960s simply wouldn’t fly six decades down the line when society has progressed by leaps and bounds.
Several entries from the past, when viewed through a modern lens, do nothing to silence the critics who’ve branded 007 as a sexist, misogynist, xenophobic, and imperialist brute. Obviously, those are labels that the filmmakers and creatives have gone out of their way to avoid in recent years because nobody wants to see a 1960s-style Bond flick in the modern day when Austin Powers is right there.
However, these issues weren’t immediately eradicated when the keepers of the flame were ushered into a new era. The ‘Bond girl’ didn’t manage to outrun its vapid trappings until the 21st century when Daniel Craig’s five-film tenure presented a number of female characters who were much more than eye candy, love interests, and notches on a bedpost, whereas Denise Richards wasn’t quite as fortunate.
Actors are there to do the job they were hired to do, and unless they’re a superstar or someone in a position of power as a producer, they don’t get a lot of input into their characters. The casting department signed up Richards to play Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough, and the costume department decided the nuclear physicist would wear hotpants and a tank top.
Naturally, the knives were out for the actor from the start, with one of the film’s biggest recurring criticisms pointing to Richards as its weakest link. There wasn’t much she could do about it when she was only playing the part the way it was written and designed, only to be turned into a figure of fun and widespread source of mockery.
“It broke my heart that people were making fun of me,” she admitted to Variety. “Oh, really? You’re wearing shorts, and you’re a nuclear scientist. I’m playing a ‘Bond girl’. If I wore a lab coat and pants and a suit, then fans would have been upset, like, ‘OK, why isn’t she looking like a sexy Bond girl?'”
She’s hit the nail right on the head there: Richards came in for a torrent of criticism from those who called her performance stilted and wooden, which isn’t entirely without merit. On the other side of that coin, she wore the clothes the powers-that-be told her to wear and delivered the dialogue as it was written by the screenwriters, which also absolves her of some of the blame for that horrendous final line.
