The ‘Bond girl’ who was never afraid of the curse: “It’s the one thing I should be grateful for”
A person doesn’t necessarily have to be superstitious to believe in curses, and the number of female actors who saw their careers suffer after playing a prominent role in a James Bond movie provides plenty of proof that the ‘Bond girl’ archetype can be a poisoned chalice.
It could be written off as a coincidence if it happened once or twice. However, until the Daniel Craig era finally made a concerted effort to give its women, not named Judi Dench, something more substantial to do than act as eye candy, secondary villains, or notches on a bedpost, it was a recurring trend.
Then again, Gemma Arterton was in Quantum of Solace, and she came to regret her solitary contribution to the franchise, but her character was a throwback for all the wrong reasons; seeing as the silly name generator dubbed her Strawberry Fields, she was only in a couple of scenes, and she ended up dead.
Dating back to the 1960s, countless stars of various Bond films have lamented the long-term effects of fluttering their eyelashes at 007: Rosamund Pike, Mie Hama, Denise Richards, Luciana Paluzzi, Martine Beswick, and Tania Mallet being just some of them who realised the grass wasn’t greener when they tried to outrun the shadow of cinema’s most monolithic secret agent.
While the record will be broken whenever Denis Villeneuve’s in-development instalment finally releases, the longest gap between Bond films was the six-year wait between Timothy Dalton’s Licence to Kill and Pierce Brosnan’s debut in GoldenEye. Seeking to find the balance between modernity and classicism, it was a distinctly present-day take on the spy, albeit with several flourishes from days gone by.
The most obvious was Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp, who wouldn’t have felt out of place in the Roger Moore era thanks to her innuendo-laden moniker and penchant for strangling people to death with her larynx-crushing thighs. On paper, it’s ludicrous, but the actor had no fear that she’d become the latest ‘Bond girl’ to fall victim to typecasting.
“It’s the one thing in my career that I should be the most grateful for,” she told USA Today. “It catapulted me into stardom. I was a struggling actor, and that changed everything. At the time, people were like, ‘You’re going to be a Bond girl and aren’t you afraid of being typecast?’ Afraid? It was an opportunity. I wasn’t afraid.”
There’s enough evidence to show that playing a ‘Bond girl’ can be a curse, but Janssen used it as a blessing. “I used the publicity to try to get other parts,” she explained. “It was a struggle in the beginning, but doors opened that had not opened before. I barely knew what I was doing.”
GoldenEye wasn’t her first feature, but it was her breakthrough. Using Bond as a springboard to greater renown, Janssen booked 13 roles in the next five years before landing an even bigger and more prominent one when she was cast as Jean Grey in 2000’s X-Men, giving her a high-paying recurring gig to fall back on.
