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LICENSED TO Daniel Craig roars onto cinema screens in his electric Aston Martin Valhalla this month, nearly two years late for his final outing as James Bond. But someone has taken over the wheel in his absence and she’s feisty, female and black… premieres No time to Die, the most PC Bond blockbuster yet. PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF EON PRODUCTIONS/METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS/ NICOLA DOVE
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eet Nomi, the first black female Agent 007 – Bond’s replacement in the film, but not the franchise, despite a tabloid frenzy last summer over rumours that 33-year-old Br itish actress Lashana Lynch was to be Daniel Craig’s successor. The name’s still James Bond, not Jane. But he’s not the same man who strangled a ‘Bond girl’ with her bikini top in the sexist 80s (Sean Connery in Diamonds are Forever). “Bond is a wounded animal struggling with his role as a Double O. The world has changed,” to quote the director, Cary Joji Fukunaga. When the film opens, James is retired in Jamaica with a bad knee, prefers corduroy trousers to tuxes and drives a Landrover
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Discovery around the island in the slow lane with his new wife ‘Ms Swann’ – never ‘Mrs Bond’ (Lea Seydoux reprising her character in 2015’s Spectre). Clues that the 25th Bond movie would be the most PC yet were dropped when Lynch, a Londoner of Jamaican descent, was cast as one of three Bond Woman (no one calls them Girls any more) and Fleabag creator Phoebe WallerBridge was brought in to make sure the film empowered them. She’s only the second female in the franchise’s 58 year history to have been allowed near a Bond screenplay. But James hasn’t gone soft, says Waller-Bridge: “All this talk of the way he treats women is b****cks. The important thing is that the film treats the
women properly. He doesn’t have to. He needs to be true to this character.” The trailers – all four of them – set a high bar for the costliest Bond film yet (and the longest), promising to keep us riveted to our seats for two hours and 43 minutes as our hero flies through the Unesco World Heritage streets of Matera in Italy, dives off a stone bridge on a bungee and vaults battlement walls on a Triumph Scrambler in a nod to Steve McQueen’s Great Escape. There are just as many twists and turns in the plot as Bond renews acquaintance with old time adversary Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) and pursues ‘a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology’ (Rami Malek).
