Finally, someone speaks up for what’s right (albeit on a fairly trivial issue):
James Bond casting director Debbie McWilliams has said 007 should remain white and male as auditions for Daniel Craig‘s replacement continue.
Amid speculation that the character could be reinvented as a woman or played by a black actor, McWilliams, who cast the previous 14 Bond films, said Ian Fleming ‘wrote a character, and that’s the character that stays’.
Well said, ma’am.
Unfortunately, that’s not chiseled in stone (although it should be). Why so?
McWilliams retired from her casting career prior to Amazon MGM Studios acquiring creative control of the James Bond franchise in 2025. The job of finding the next Bond now falls to casting director Nina Gold and director Denis Villeneuve.
Which means that James Bond may soon be Jamal Bond (a reformed teetotaler fresh from an AA meeting), or Jamie Bond (Lesbian Extraordinaire, with a license to munch).
Netflix has done worse, in the past.
I am so fucking sick of moviemakers turning beloved characters into something they were never intended to be. Netflix is the prime [sic] offender in this regard, having trampled all over traditional casting to be more “inclusive” and turning roles into travesties rather than just doing the simpler (and right) thing by sticking to the formula. But they’ve all done it in recent years, whether with Marvel characters or other such icons.
Hey, let’s hear it for Ian Of Green Gables, which tells the story of how a young boy has to make his way in the world after having been mistakenly put up for adoption with two lesbian Satanists.
What the hell: let’s have the whole story told in flashback (like Amadeus) after Ian is sent to a psychiatric ward for having murdered his adopted lesbian step-parents (because they molested him constantly), then blew up the offices of the government adoption agency which made the original screwup.
See how this plays out when you set out to be “creative” and change everything, just to make it more “eclectic”, more “relevant”, more “inclusive” or more “edgy”?
Never mind that you’ve just turned a beloved classic story into a near-parody.
I don’t know what the hell these people think they’re doing, or how they believe that they have the right to do this to our culture.
So let’s keep James Bond a white man, with sociopathic tendencies and a harsh, cynical outlook on life — just as Ian Fleming imagined him. It worked unbelievably well for the novel series (a.k.a. “franchise”, another word I’ve come to detest), and it worked for the Sean Connery-era of Bond movies (reflected in poll after poll, where Sir Sean continues to outrank all his successors — emphasis on “suck” — when it comes to the “ideal” James Bond).
And if The Usual Suspects don’t like that paradigm, they are free to come up with a new character and a new storyline outside the existing canon. It will fail, of course, just as the Bond “franchise” will fail when James is replaced with “alternative” versions.
You heard it here first.
