Saoirse Ronan is “dead serious” about playing a James Bond villain.
As the race to play 007 amps up — and Ronan’s husband and father of her child, Jack Lowden, among the rumored contenders — the Oscar-nominated actress talked to Empire about one day playing an antagonist in the franchise. Denis Villeneuve is set to direct an upcoming Bond film for Amazon MGM Studios, with Peaky Blinders mastermind Steven Knight penning the script.
“I want to go dark,” the star of Little Women and Lady Bird told the outlet while promoting her latest feature, 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.”
If her dream were to become a reality, the Irish actress would join a prestigious lineup of Bond baddies — a group that includes Rami Malek, Christoph Waltz, Javier Bardem and Mads Mikkelsen in the Daniel Craig era alone.
Reports have continued to swirl around who might next don the tuxedo of Ian Fleming’s beloved spy. Callum Turner, Jacob Elordi, Tom Holland, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Harris Dickinson and Ronan’s partner Lowden (Slow Horses) are among some of the more high-profile names to have been floated but Amazon has refused to confirm any casting decisions just yet. (The studio struck a deal with longtime franchise stewards Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson to take full control of the character and its IP in February 2025.)
In fact, The Hollywood Reporter took a look at why the Bond rumor mill continues to churn out duds in analysis earlier this year. The gossip, Benjamin Svetkey and Julian Sancton noted, becomes a story of its own, a casting sweepstakes — even if “99 percent of the rumors turn out to be false,” as one longtime franchise insider puts it. “Actually, make that 100 percent.”
Casting director Debbie McWilliams, who has cast 14 Bonds in her time, spoke just last month at a Karlovy Vary panel about picking the right actor. “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,” she told attendees.
“He’s got to have a kind of threat about him,” which Pierce Brosnan, she said, didn’t quite have. “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.”
Knight spoke briefly to THR about how his script is coming along while promoting Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man in March. “I would literally be killed if I [said anything],” said the House of Guinness and A Thousand Blows creator. “I can’t talk about it at all, apart from to say it’s wonderful.”
Ronan will next be seen in Sam Mendes’ Beatles biopics as Linda McCartney, as well as Alice Rohrwacher’s Three Incestuous Sisters with Josh O’Connor, Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, Isabella Rossellini and Mick Jagger.
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