The one ‘Bond girl’ who refused to reprise their role: “She turned it down”
For most of the franchise’s existence, the ‘Bond girl’ archetype hasn’t lent itself to more than one movie, and the reasons are obvious for why so many female characters only made one-and-done contributions to 007’s globetrotting adventures.
Until recently, they didn’t serve much purpose beyond being eye candy. Even when Pierce Brosnan debuted in GoldenEye to end James Bond’s longest-ever sabbatical from the silver screen, writer Jeffrey Caine was handed a document that informed him that only four stereotypes were fit for purpose.
Unless it was whoever was playing Moneypenny or Judi Dench’s M, female actors almost never returned to Bond. Eunice Grayson’s Sylvia Trench appeared in the first two instalments, Dr No and From Russia with Love, and she was the only actor to play a major female character who appeared in two Bond flicks until Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann swung by Spectre and No Time to Die.
Maud Adams and Martine Beswick were in two films as different characters, and Nikki van der Zyl was in more than any other woman, albeit restricted to the recording booth. It was part and parcel of Bond that female characters didn’t show up in more than a solitary picture, but it would have happened sooner than Seydoux had Michelle Yeoh shown even a shred of interest in a comeback.
The future Academy Award winner and action icon played Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies, a role that remarkably avoided almost all cliches associated with the ‘Bond girl’. When the saga’s 20th feature was being pieced together behind the scenes, a scene set in Hong Kong presented the ideal opportunity for Yeoh to make a cameo appearance in Die Another Day, released on the 50th anniversary of Bond. Or at least, that was the plan.
“Yes, Michelle Yeoh was supposed to come back into the picture, and in a not substantial part, but for the Hong Kong sequence,” director Lee Tamahori confirmed to Cinema Blend. “And we went out to see her, we went out to have a meeting with her in Hong Kong, and she turned it down.”
Tamahori explained that because Yeoh was fresh from the worldwide success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and her international profile had skyrocketed as a result, she wasn’t interested in a brief, unimportant, and ultimately gratuitous cameo that served no other purpose than nodding to one of Brosnan’s past adventures.
Then again, it’s not like Yeoh was booked and busy when Die Another Day was shooting. After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, she only made one movie in the next four years, and production on Peter Pau’s martial arts epic The Touch had wrapped long before Brosnan’s fourth and final outing as the iconic secret agent finished shooting. She didn’t want to do it, and that’s fair enough.
