It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
White? No, I don't think Bond has to be white. British, but not white exclusively in my opinion.
Male? Yes, I think Bond should be male and cisgender as a character regardless of the actor.
It depends in this instance. So long as the fundamentals of the character are adhered to.
I'm pretty much on this exact same wavelength. I suppose in the end it's pretty subjective as to what "goes too far" for people regarding changes to Bond's traditional character. If he ditches key qualities in his behaviors like drinking, womanizing, and gambling, I'll definitely feel like they've gotten too far away from what the character is. Between supposed internal Amazon discussions and the trend in modern movies in general, my biggest fear is Bond becoming too much of a boy scout. We need flawed heroes.
For instance, B26 could be a shot for shot remake of the infamous BICYCLE MAN episode of "Diff'rent Strokes", with Bond essentially being the Gordon Jump character..........and as long as it's done well, the future of 007 will be assured. :D
Sorry couldn't resist.........carry on. :D
Gregg Wilson is clearly deluded and shouldn’t be trusted with any decision-making in casting the next Bond.
Ethnicity makes no difference; it’s perfectly possible for someone to possess the qualities of Bond without being white. I don’t really see why folks are so wed to it.
As the question is ‘what if?’, well what would happen is a load of tedious right wing grifter men on YouTube would make a big song and dance about it, make up a load of stories about how the studio is in trouble because they cast a non-white guy, how they’ve had to do a load of reshoots to make it less woke and loads of guys would swallow it whole, papers like The Daily Mail would pick up on it, awful people on X would never stop going on about it and it would all be horrible. Look at the hideous discourse when they dared to cast a black Bond woman in the last film, just disgusting- and she was just a supporting character. We really have gone backwards.
And in the first Kim Sherwood book.
As for the question, I'd much prefer James Bond to be portrayed as in the books.
You have to be careful with all this. Saying 'I don't want a black James Bond' isn't like saying 'I don't want a black doctor', or 'I don't want a black postman'. Some people don't see the distinction though, so you can often land in hot water.
I'm quite comfortable saying I want him as Fleming described him. This is partly why DC is my least favourite Bond actor. He's a great actor and brilliant screen presence, but he fell a bit too short of the book description for me to be totally on-board.
So for me, and actor with a different ethnicity would be too far removed from the book Bond. I want another Tim Dalton, basically.
I mostly agree with this but want to add that I genuinely think a Black or nonwhite Bond would go over pretty well, eventually. There would be initial backlash from the expected places, but I think it would get quashed quickly by the final product. Once the film is out, barring any ridiculous boycott movements, I think everyone would move on quickly once the actor and Eon once again proves themselves.
I always see it as two questions for people: Can JB be nonwhite? yes. Should he be white? You can argue to stick to the author's description, but that's about it. So those are the two questions I frame it as. Objective and then personal. If people try to fight me on the objective, it's a fight.
Fleming wrote him to reflect the men he worked with in the war, but it doesn't have to stay that strict if the character is to evolve for modern times. I think even Fleming would be interested in challenging the whiteness of Bond eventually, as he wrote a woman character in TSWLM and even teased Bond's death. He is not opposed to playing with the storytelling.
My big point I want EON to take note of is this: do not make Bond's race the plot of the movie in the first one at least. If he's black, there can be hints or nods to the black experience in spywork, any racism they may face, subtleties, but it shouldn't be the main plot that Bond has to now deal with being a different race. He should be Bond still, with a mission. If they want to play with how race impacts the character, do it subtly across the series of films, maybe have one really nasty racist villain if you want, just to mix it up, but just not the opening film. It should add to the character but not distract also from who he already is.
Sure, but it would be years up to that point, it would be exhausting. The culture war movement has become very lucrative for the people who choose to exploit it: at least the whole CraigNotBond thing wasn't really monetized, but now these people are out for a profit and will push the outrage button as hard as they can. You'd have certain politicians even weighing in on it to try and get mileage and attention out of it (as they did when Jaguar cars supposedly 'went woke' recently) because Bond is seen as important to the country. It'll be horrible.
And bear in mind, Michael Wilson said that he thought the initial backlash against Craig's appearance did actually affect CR's box office.
I'm not saying that's a reason not to do it, but just that we'll have to prepare ourselves for all the racists making noise.
Yeah I just don't think it matters all that much: books get adapted all the time and no-one expects the characters to look exactly as they're described. The John McClane character in the book Die Hard was based on was a guy in his 60s.
And the idealised image most people have of the perfect, super handsome, raven-haired suave Bond doesn't even really come from Fleming, he's mostly a product of the films. Fleming's Bond was a slimmer, scarred man in an old battered suit and we've never really seen him on screen yet.
Bond has moved on from Fleming, in truth the James Bond 007 most people know is the creation of Ian Fleming, Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman: he's not Ian Fleming's James Bond.
Yeah I guess it could be mentioned but I'd be tempted to steer clear of it for the most part: Bond tends to live in a slightly idealised society where many prejudices don't get mentioned much, or has for the most part. I thought it felt slightly jarring in NTTD when Valdo suddenly turned into a super-racist.
Maybe it would work though, I'd be open to it.
To add those elements would make it feel rather superficial as opposed to organic/natural. If the next Bond is black or any other skin color, the best solution is to just have Bond be Bond; doing the things that we all know and love. After all if race isn’t such a big deal, why make it one within the films itself by drawing attention to the fact that the new Bond is black?
Yeah that moment in NTTD was strange, especially since there was nothing to really indicate Valdo was racist or anything prior to that line of dialog. He was just comic relief mostly; I suppose there had to be some kind of justification for Nomi killing him. But still it’s jarring.
That's an irony I see on a lot of fan sites and message boards: So many complaining about Craig - he's blond, he's short, he looks like a bodybuilder, he looks like Putin, etc. It's not how Ian Fleming described Bond. Dalton can't do one-liners, he has no humor, his LTK hairstyle looks like Dracula, he dresses like he's in a Miami Vice episode, he's a one-woman man, that's not Bond.
They want to try to make a case against the actors by name-dropping Fleming without an actual clue of the content. There was also little or no humor in those early stories either. Even Eon's publicity for LALD tried to spin that Moore was actually closer to Fleming's Bond than Connery was.
[/quote]
Well said.
I kind of agree about Valdo abruptly turning racist. It was clearly there to give Nomi a reason to kill him (a reason to die, ha). They could have worked his racism into the script a bit earlier.
Or change it entirely and have Valdo say something like "I could kill your whole family like that just by changing my settings."
They just want extermination just pure hatred towards a certain group kind of sounds no different than the nazis. I can see this whole thread turning toxic fast.
This board has generally been doing quite a good job from turning a thread toxic. Though I agree that the term "modernized" in the present thread title should be in quotation marks, as it clearly is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, and not everyone may get that.
That's good 👍
Lets hope if he is indeed changed that it is done for the purposes of the story. There would be PR galore with both sides weighing in. As just as there are "right wing" content producers out there, the left also has content creators too. It has a possibility to over take the role and even the film.
Tricky waters to navigate. But one that could be done if the producers are looking for a shake up or a change in direction within the series or story arc they are looking to deliver to audiences.
I just say create new diverse characters instead of changing characters