Saoirse Ronan wants to play a villain in the James Bond franchise. While catching up with Empire, Ronan, whose husband, Jack Lowden, is among the rumored contenders to play 007 in Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming Bond film, is “dead serious” about challenging the secret agent like never before.
“I want to go dark,” Ronan told the outlet while promoting Jonatan Etzler’s satirical thriller Bad Apples. “I said that I wanted to be a Bond villain and I’m dead serious,” she added. “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.”
Amazon MGM Studios is taking its sweet time while searching for the next actor to play James Bond, with Callum Turner, Jacob Elordi, Tom Holland, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Harris Dickinson, and Ronan’s partner, Slow Horses actor Jack Lowden, in consideration to have their martinis shaken, not stirred.
Meanwhile, casting director Debbie McWilliams, who has cast actors across 14 Bond films in her time, says whoever plays Bond needs to check all the boxes. While speaking at a Karlovy Vary panel on picking the ultimate 007 actor, she said, “Part of his job description is licensed to kill. So you’ve got to think that he could pick a gun up and shoot you.” Elaborating on that thought, McWilliams continued, “He’s got to have a kind of threat about him,” which Pierce Brosnan, she said, lacked. “But he embodied a different side of him. He was very good looking and suave, and all the rest of it.” Craig, by contrast, “changed that somewhat in that he was much tougher.”
Personally, I would love to see Saoirse Ronan go head-to-head with James Bond. If Amazon is looking to shake things up with the era of Bond films, why not set the pace by having Ronan join the likes of Rami Malek, Christoph Waltz, Javier Bardem, and Mads Mikkelsen? Obviously, there would be some blowback online, but people would eventually get over it after Ronan blows the role out of the water.
Would you be down to see Saoirse Ronan match wits against James Bond? Let us know in the comments section below.