The Hollywood icon who refused to play a Bond girl: “A Bond girl is an afterthought”
Every James Bond movie needs a few ingredients. There must be some expensive suits, a luxury car with special gadgets built in, several daring stunts, a martini (shaken, not stirred), and, of course, an objectified female character. Depending on your perspective, this last ingredient is either a major selling point or a defect. Like it or not, however, it’s been a part of the franchise since the very first movie.
When Ursula Andress strolled onto the beach in 1962’s Dr No, wearing a bikini and a holster with a knife, it set the tone for the next six decades. They might not be nude bodies covered in gold paint anymore or carry around names like Pussy Galore and Holly Goodhead, but they remain marginalised and objectified.
Being in a Bond film is an almost guaranteed route to overnight stardom, so it’s hardly surprising that dozens of actors have taken on these roles over the years. Still, it’s hard to see how luminaries like Diana Rigg, Grace Jones, and Michelle Yeoh benefitted from taking on the challenge. Rigg was already working with the Royal Shakespeare Company when she appeared in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1967. Jones was already a Studio 54 icon when she appeared in A View to a Kill in 1985. And by the time she appeared in Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997, Yeoh was already the pre-eminent action hero of the Martial Arts genre.
Another established star who was asked to play a Bond girl saw the opportunity for what it was and turned it down. In the early 1980s, the Broccoli family, which steered the franchise all the way up until 2025, approached Pam Grier about playing the latest 007 bedfellow in their upcoming film, Octopussy, opposite Roger Moore. This might have seemed like a good fit for the Broccolis, but as far as Grier was concerned, it was a complete non-starter.
At the time, she had already been an action star for about a decade, helping to shape the blaxploitation genre and becoming one of the first female action heroes who never needed co-stars to sell out theatres. 1971’s The Big Doll House, 1973’s Coffy, and 1974’s Foxy Brown made her one of the biggest stars of the era, and she was under no illusions about that Bond offer. It was a demotion.
“My agents had me meet with the Broccoli family, and I’m going, ‘I’m not available,'” Grier told Entertainment Weekly in 2023, explaining that she arrived at the meeting with her mind already made up. “I just felt to be a Bond girl would be: What am I going to do?” she said. “Am I going to help rescue him? Is he rescuing me? A Bond girl is an afterthought, a CliffNote, perhaps.” She didn’t turn the Broccoli’s down right off the bat. She asked them a few questions. “Am I challenging Bond? Am I out to kill him? Will I kill him before he kills me?” They apparently had not considered any of it yet.
It must have been clear to the producers even then that Grier would have been a much bigger asset to the Bond franchise than the Bond franchise would be to her. By the ’90s, she finally got the offers she deserved when directors like Quentin Tarantino, who had grown up watching her ’70s films, wrote parts specifically for her and with reverence for her accomplishments.
