Gemma Arterton on her James Bond regrets: “I realised there was so much wrong”
Having spent over 60 years at the forefront of pop culture, it’s an obligation for the James Bond franchise to continue adapting with the times to remain relevant and avoid becoming an outdated relic, although Gemma Arterton harbours disappointment after her more recent contributions to canon failed to hit the mark.
On paper and largely in practice, the Daniel Craig era ushered in a new dawn for 007, where girls and gadgets were increasingly placed in the background in favour of a more grounded, gritty, and realistic aesthetic that dragged the formerly quip-happy shagger kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
The entire five-film arc between Casino Royale and No Time to Die unfolded with the shadow of Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd lurking in the background, virtually unheard of when Bond had spent decades casually hopping from bed to bed without a care in the world. There were exceptions, though, and Arterton’s Strawberry Fields was one of them.
Harking back to an era thought left behind, the actor was given a character with a silly name who bedded the suave secret agent and was then promptly killed off to provide inner turmoil and further the plot. At the time of her casting, Arterton promised a different kind of Bond girl to what audiences had been conditioned to expect, but things didn’t quite turn out as planned.
That being said, it was accurate to call Fields “really retro and a bit of a throwback,” just not for the right reasons. Arterton “tried to make her straight-laced but with a real naughty edge to her,” going so far as to describe the character as “the thinking man’s crumpet”. Fast forward a dozen years, though, and her opinion had shifted somewhat.
During an interview with The Sun, Arterton confessed her enthusiasm had been partly driven by being cast as a Bond girl at the age of only 21, but her sentiment eventually shifted. “As I got older, I realised there was so much wrong with Bond women,” she admitted. “Strawberry should have just said no, really, and worn flat shoes.”
Her on-screen death was intended to act as a tribute to Goldfinger after being drowned in crude oil, but it had the adverse effect of echoing an age of disposable women the long-running spy series was trying to leave behind. It was a huge boost for what was only a fledgling career at the time, in fairness, even if Arterton ended up regretting the way Fields was treated as little more than another notch on Bond’s bedpost, who met their demise shortly afterwards.
The purists may have been thrilled to see a tribute to the 1960s classics, but those movies were very much products of their time, while Craig’s film was trying to meet much the same remit under vastly different circumstances.
