Naomie Harris, star of the new James Bond film No Time to Die, has called out the use of the term “Bond girls”.
Harris has starred alongside Daniel Craig as Miss Moneypenny since 2012’s Skyfall. She reprised the role in 2015’s Spectre. Tough and outspoken, she is the secretary to M, who is Bond’s boss and the head of the British Secret Service.
“You can’t call us girls,” she told The Mirror. “We are truly women. I look at the older Bond movies, and the term girl is probably appropriate because they aren’t fully fleshed-out characters.
“But, particularly in No Time to Die, they are formidable women driving the plot forward.”
In 2018, a video of 007’s most misogynist moments went viral, highlighting moments when the “hero” has taken advantage of vulnerable women and even physically restrained them until they submitted to sex. In 1963’s From Russia With Love, for example, Sean Connery’s Bond tried to beat a confession out of Daniela Bianchi’s Tatiana Romanova.
In more recent years, Bond producers have acknowledged the spy’s amorality. For example, Judi Dench’s M scolds Pierce Brosnan’s Bond for being a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the cold war” in 1995’s GoldenEye.
Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge was hired to work on the new Bond script. She is the second ever female writer to be involved with the franchise, after Johanna Harwood, the secretary of the first Bond producer Harry Saltzman. She helped with the screenplays of Dr No and From Russia With Love.
The release of No Time to Die was recently delayed again until April 2021. It had been due to come out next month.
The 25th Bond film will be Craig’s final outing as the spy. Find out the actors rumoured to replace him, here.
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