Fans of James Bond enjoy playing the recasting game almost as much as actually watching the movies. Their voices have only grown louder as it seems Daniel Craig is ready to move away from the role. While many fans have clamored for a fresh (read: not a white guy) face to take on the codename and license to kill, one Bond executive producer has said that they shouldn't expect too radical a shift.
Bond executive producer Barbara Broccoli said in an interview with the Guardian that Bond will always be played by a man.
“Bond is male,” she said. “He’s a male character. He was written as a male and I think he’ll probably stay as a male."
However, Broccoli said that there's plenty of room for strong female characters in the Bond universe.
“That’s fine. We don’t have to turn male characters into women," she said. "Let’s just create more female characters and make the story fit those female characters.”
Broccoli was the first to share all aspects of the Bond 25 director shake-up and was the person who convinced Craig to come back for the upcoming film. The executive producer thinks that there are certain bits of the Bond story that are baked in and said that the self-referential nature of newer Bond movies means that aspects of the character are unlikely to change.
"It was written in the '50s, so there’s certain things in [Bond’s] DNA that are probably not gonna change,” she said. “But look at the way the world has changed. And I think Bond has come through and transformed with the times. I’ve tried to do my part, and I think particularly with the Daniel [Craig] films, they’ve become much more current in terms of the way women are viewed.”
Broccoli has been championed for making the sets of Bond films safe spaces for women. "I look back over my experience on the Bond film and think, my goodness Barbara Broccoli was way ahead of all this #MeToo movement," actress Rosamund Pike told Amazon's Audible Sessions. "There wasn't an ounce of feeling uncomfortable while I was on that set."
