The reluctant ‘Bond girl’ who only did it for the money: “Not necessarily desirable”
Being offered the chance to appear in one of cinema’s most iconic franchises is something many actors would jump at, but one James Bond star admitted they were motivated mainly by cold, hard cash.
That’s fair enough, because at the end of the day, everyone has bills to pay. Unfortunately, the actor in question was given one of the silliest names in 007 history and played the female lead in one of the silliest films in 007 history, so let’s hope she was well-compensated for her efforts.
Ironically, Lois Chiles had already knocked back the opportunity to be a ‘Bond girl’ when Cubby Broccoli sought her out to play a major part in The Spy Who Loved Me, but she was in the midst of a four-year sabbatical from the industry after 1974’s Robert Redford-led The Great Gatsby, and not even pop culture’s most famous secret agent could tempt her out of exile.
When the casting search began for Moonraker, Broccoli hadn’t given up on his dreams of landing Chiles for a major female role. After the unprecedented success of Star Wars, the movie business decided that everything would be better off with a sci-fi bent, which is why Roger Moore’s Bond was sent beyond the stars.
On paper, a CIA agent masquerading as a NASA astronaut sounds more substantial than the one-note characters typically written for ‘Bond girls’, only for Chiles’ character to be named Holly Goodhead, quite possibly the most ludicrous double entendre in 007 history. If not, it’s surely the most ridiculous moniker, which is saying something for a saga that gave the world Strawberry Fields, Christmas Jones, and Plenty O’Toole.
Even at the time, Chiles knew that boarding a franchise as entrenched in the casual sexism and misogyny of the time as Bond was a risk, and she took a thinly-veiled dig at the brand’s miserly attempts to be progressive by kitting her out in a costume that kept her covered from her ankles to her neck.
“You have to realise this was the ’70s, and women were very upset about being portrayed as sexual objects,” she recalled. “So becoming a ‘Bond girl’ was not necessarily desirable. Wearing that yellow spacesuit during much of the movie didn’t make me very alluring, and some fans were disappointed. But it was their concession to the women’s movement.”
It says a lot about the braintrust behind 007 that their idea of reflecting the social and societal upheaval instigated by second-wave feminism was to give Moonraker‘s female lead a relatively unflattering ensemble compared to her predecessors, but the series was hardly known for its well-rounded women during the Moore and Sean Connery eras.
Why did she do it, then? Because she’d taken a four-year break from acting, which is a lot of lost income. “I needed the work, I needed the money, and I needed the experience,” she explained of her decision to board Bond at the second time of asking, and things even came full circle two decades later when she made an uncredited cameo in Austin Powers, which relentlessly parodied the 007 period she contributed to.
