Rachel Weisz makes a good point when she states just why she wouldn’t want to see a female James Bond. It’s not so much a sexist thing as it is a need for women to expand into their own roles and not take on predominantly male characters that are known for interacting with the opposite sex in a very unique and characteristic way. It’s bound to be twisted and stretched in a manner that would make people wonder just what makes others think that James Bond could never be a female character, but I agree with Weisz that it shouldn’t happen. Bond has been such an icon for years that making the character into a woman would mean that she would have to compete with every version of bond since Connery onward, and that would be an uphill climb not unlike Everest, only with little to no hope of making it to the peak even if someone were to write the best script in the world. It’s not sexist really, it’s simply truth, it would be better to settle upon a female character that is essentially LIKE James Bond, but is not and will never be the iconic character. It would be more fair for the woman involved and much more accepted by fans if a woman could enter such a role and make it just as iconic.
You might already be saying that we have those kind of women already and have seen female spies making a leap into the movies, but so far they’ve all been one and done characters or haven’t gained enough ground to really warrant a movie all to themselves. Lara Croft and Atomic Blonde are two of those that seem to come the closest in terms of iconic characters that people might want to see get pushed forward time and again, but like everything else they need to be given enough development and a great enough story to push forth in order to be worth the effort.
Bond belonged to a different time when things were much less PC than they are now concerning matters between men and women and the world was a place where the kinds of things that you saw in Bond films would no longer be acceptable. Trying to put a woman into the role of a man that objectified women quite often seems kind of odd just at the outset and honestly I don’t believe it would work the way some think it would. The creativity of the bit would also go away as people need to realize that Bond has been iconic for so long because he’s never once changed who he is for the most part. Between men and women there are many differences that would have to reconciled between a male and female character, which would essentially force the character to lose a part of who he is.
There’s nothing to say that a woman couldn’t start a series like this, but the story would have to be their own and not connected at all to Bond, so as to avoid upsetting fans of the franchise or in any diminishing the new series that would need to be pushed forward.
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