There haven’t been very many female Bond villains over the years, at least not as the “main” villain, and Saoirse Ronan wants to change that. I do too. The Bond franchise is replete with the same basic avatar of a villain. It’s typically an older guy with designs on somehow taking over the world. You can’t argue with the success of the template, but with the upcoming 26th Bond movie, the franchise is getting rebooted in a big way, so now is the time!
Bond Is Getting Reinvented, Maybe It’s Finally Time
Ronan, who is probably best known for playing more dramatic roles in movies like Lady Bird and Little Women, or in quirky comedies like The French Dispatch and The Grand Budapest Hotel, has never really played a baddie in a film. So that makes her kind of perfect to take on the role of a Bond villain; it would be a real change of pace for the actor. Here’s what Ronan recently told Empire:
I want to go dark. I said that I wanted to be a Bond villain and I’m dead serious.
She has a clear idea why, too, adding:
I think it would be really interesting, having a young female villain. Especially for girls and women, to see someone who can just take all that pent-up anger and direct it somewhere, there’s something interesting in that dramatically. So I would love to do more of that.
I’ll admit I’m not sure that playing a villain as an inspiration to others is the best idea. But I do think that Ronan could play a completely new kind of Bond antagonist, rather than the standard old guy villain that we’ve seen most often in the Bond franchise over the years. A young, fierce woman, kind of in the vein of Sophie Marceau in The World Is Not Enough, but with less “damsel in distress” at the beginning, would be amazing.
There have been henchwomen and secondary female villains, like Grace Jones’ May Day in A View to a Kill, and Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love. Marceau’s Electra in The World Is Not Enough is (secretly at first) the real villain of the movie, but that reveal comes late in its runtime. I want to see a classic villain, who is the main baddie from the start with a plan to take over the world, in the mold of Goldfinger or Blofeld.
Of course, most of the major female roles in the franchise have been the famous “Bond girls,” some of whom have been antagonists towards 007, but rarely in true “villain” form. With Bond 26 being the first movie produced since Amazon MGM bought the franchise (meaning you can watch all of them with a Prime subscription) from the Broccoli family, I do think they’ll play it a little safe with this one and not shock the fanbase by straying too far from the tried-and-true formula. But I’d be all in if they did.
