The ‘Bond girl’ who wishes they’d turned down the role: “I think that stereotyped me”
It’s not going to be an issue cinema’s biggest spy saga will ever have to face again, considering how attitudes have continued to change and evolve during its six-decade existence, but for a long time, playing the love interest in a James Bond movie was one of cinema’s most dangerous double-edged swords.
For an up-and-coming actor, being cast in a prominent role in a blockbuster that’s guaranteed to be seen by millions of viewers worldwide is something that can’t be turned down. On the other side of that coin, gaining so much exposure by sticking to such rigid and increasingly outdated archetypes had the potential to cast a career-long shadow.
Tsai Chin didn’t look back too fondly on her experience of playing a stereotypical and borderline offensive character opposite Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice, but the overriding sentiment always tended to be the same: which unknown star in their right mind would even consider turning down a Bond flick?
Luciana Paluzzi was another who suffered in the aftermath of her 007 outing Thunderball after discovering upon her return to her native Italy that none of the country’s most prominent auteurs were interested in working with her because she’d played a bombshell in a frothy Hollywood caper.
It wasn’t a phenomenon that completely ended in the 21st century, either, with Gemma Arterton’s initial enthusiasm over being killed off in short order as Quantum of Solace‘s Strawberry Fields swiftly turning to disappointment. In the modern era, it’s highly unlikely that the ‘Bond girl’ will ever revert to the one-note eye candy that defined it in decades past, with Tanya Roberts left wishing she hadn’t typecast herself.
“I sort of felt like every girl who’d ever been a ‘Bond girl’ had seen their career go nowhere, so I was a little cautious,” she confessed to the Daily Mail. Despite her doubts, she accepted the part of Stacey Sutton in 1985’s A View to a Kill, only to discover after the movie’s release that she’d already been stereotyped.
“At the time, I didn’t know what I know now, and to be honest, who would turn down that role, really?” she asked. Roberts was already an experienced actor with plenty of film and television credits by that point, but what should have been a star-making turn instead pushed her even deeper into a box she didn’t want to be in.
“I think it’s better to come into the limelight really slowly and do a broader range of roles, but I took these glamorous roles, and I think that stereotyped me,” she explained. “They sort of think you’re some dumb, glamorous broad, so it’s difficult, and I think that is the reason most ‘Bond girls’ don’t go on to have careers because people just don’t take them seriously.”
Sure enough, Roberts’s highest-profile role after A View to a Kill in terms of audience size and visibility was arguably that of Midge Pinciotti, the mother of a main character on the popular sitcom That ’70s Show.
