Nipple covers, body tape, and the love scene that made a ‘Bond girl’ fear the worst: “I was so mortified!”
If you want to be a ‘Bond girl’, for the most part, you’re going to have to sleep with James Bond. For better or worse, those are the rules, and more than 60 years later, they aren’t for changing.
While the most recent string of films made gains in presenting their prominent female characters as more than mere objects of desire for the central lothario to seduce, that doesn’t mean the Daniel Craig era turned 007 into a chaste figure, because there are always certain boxes that need to be ticked.
In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for Bond to have at least two love interests over the course of a single film, which is what happened to Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day, although shooting those scenes was a lot less titillating than they were supposed to look on camera, and some might say unintentionally comical.
When he was romping with Halle Berry’s Jinx, the leading man ended up performing the Heimlich manoeuvre when the Academy Award-winning Monster’s Ball star’s attempt at using a fig as a means of seductive improvisation backfired so spectacularly that she ended up choking on it instead.
Remarkably, that wasn’t the only time during production that one of Bond’s bedroom escapades went awry, or, to not put too fine a point on it, tits-up. However, on this occasion, Rosamund Pike convinced herself that Brosnan was the one in need of saving. Or shaving, based on her recollection.
Before she reveals herself to have been a traitor all along, Pike’s Miranda Frost gets down to business with 007. It was the actor’s first role in a feature, and it introduced her to some movie magic she’d previously been unfamiliar with. “I discovered things like nipple covers,” she recalled. “And all the taping.”
“We have this clinch, and then we separate, and I look at this body tape and the nipple covers, and they’re covered in hair,” Pike went on. “And I think, ‘Oh my god, I’m waxing Pierce’s chest! I was so mortified! I thought, ‘Oh my god, he’s so brave, and I’m pulling off his chest hair with every embrace.”
As anyone who saw his Bond films will be aware, Brosnan is a bit of a hairy fella, so maybe he was so hirsute that he could barely feel that his chest rug was being yanked on every take. That was the impression Pike was under for a while, until she realised what was really going on.
“It took a couple of takes to realise it was not him,” she added. “It was the fake fur of the rugs adorning the bed. I literally thought I was waxing the poor man’s chest!” You’d imagine that Brosnan would have let it be known had his chest hair been getting ripped out, but it was all a miscommunication, albeit a very bizarre one.
