Can James Bond be Black, Brown or a Woman?

As Amazon MGM searches for the next 007, can Ian Fleming’s most famous creation change race or sex and still remain recognisably James Bond?

The next James Bond should not be Brown. He should not be Black. He cannot be Asian. And he certainly cannot be a woman. Can I actually say all of that now? Well, I’ve said it. I suppose I had better explain what I mean.

Since Amazon MGM Studios closed its deal with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson on 24 March 2025, creating a joint venture in which all three remain co-owners but Amazon MGM now holds creative control, there has been intense speculation about how the world’s most famous secret agent will be rebooted. Daniel Craig did, after all, rather inconveniently allow James Bond to be blown to pieces at the end of No Time to Die.

In the more progressive and diverse world in which we now live, there has naturally been discussion about updating Ian Fleming’s iconic character. Could Bond be played by somebody who is not white? Could Bond be Black, Brown or Asian? Could the character be gay? Could James Bond be a woman?

Idris Elba spent years being pushed towards the tuxedo by fans, journalists and the rumour mill. Riz Ahmed has since created the brilliant six-part Prime Video comedy Bait, in which he plays a struggling British-Pakistani actor whose world implodes after he auditions for James Bond. He propels himself into the public conversation, then finds himself confronting his insecurities, identity and imposter syndrome.

When the Bond casting debate itself becomes the plot of a television series, we have officially entered the era of Bondception.

James Bond and 007 are not the same thing

Before getting into the meat of this, we need to make one crucial distinction. We are not talking about 007.

007 is a designation assigned to an agent by the fictional version of MI6. It can be transferred. No Time to Die established that clearly when Bond had retired and Lashana Lynch’s character, Nomi, inherited the number.

So 007 can be Black. 007 can be Brown. 007 can be Asian. 007 can be a woman.

James Bond, however, is a person.

The franchise has already reinvented several established characters. Judi Dench took the previously male role of M and made it so completely her own that she spanned both the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig eras. Ben Whishaw’s Q was quietly established as gay. Bond’s CIA friend Felix Leiter has been played by seven actors in the official film series, with Jeffrey Wright becoming the first Black actor to portray him. Wright also became the first Black actor to play Commissioner Gordon in a Batman film. Naomie Harris became the first Black actress to play Miss Moneypenny.

The franchise survived all of that perfectly well. In several cases, the reinterpretation strengthened the character.

James Bond, though, is a whole other kettle of fish.

To understand Bond, understand Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming was not simply a wordsmith dreaming up a fantasy life of espionage from the comfort of an armchair. He never quite lived Bond’s precise life, but he worked inside British naval intelligence during an extraordinary era and drew heavily upon that world.

Fleming was born in 1908 and came from money and privilege. His grandfather had founded a merchant bank. His father, Valentine Fleming, was a Conservative Member of Parliament, an Eton-educated army officer and precisely the sort of figure who belonged naturally within the British establishment.

Fleming lost his father when he was eight years old. Valentine was killed in action in 1917, and no less than Winston Churchill wrote his obituary for The Times.

Fleming therefore grew up with two powerful inheritances: establishment confidence and personal loss. He knew the world of admirals, ministers and aristocrats, while learning very young that privilege could not protect you from death.

He went to Eton, where he was athletic, edited the school magazine and acquired some of the polish we would later associate with Bond. He also repeatedly clashed with authority. He attended Sandhurst but left without taking a commission. After that came a formative period studying languages in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, absorbing the atmosphere of continental Europe.

That perhaps helps to explain why Bond moves with such ease through Europe. He knows the hotels, casinos, ski resorts, food, clothes and unspoken rules of the room. Fleming knew many of those things because he had lived them.

Fleming subsequently worked for Reuters and reported from Moscow. Then came the Second World War, and this is where the most important ingredients were added.

He joined the Royal Navy’s Naval Intelligence Division and became assistant to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence. Godfrey is widely regarded as a major inspiration for M.

Fleming was not routinely parachuting behind enemy lines, seducing double agents and blowing up secret bases before breakfast. His strengths lay in intelligence planning, liaison and imaginative problem-solving. Yet that position placed him remarkably close to the machinery of espionage. He dealt with secret operations, enemy technology, deception plans and the acquisition of intelligence.

He was involved in creating the unit that became 30 Assault Unit, whose specialist teams advanced into enemy territory to seize documents, equipment and technical information. Fleming knew the officials and officers deciding what had to be done, and he encountered the commandos and agents expected to go out and do their bidding.

Many men have therefore been proposed as the “real” James Bond. They include Fleming’s adventurous elder brother Peter; Patrick Dalzel-Job, the resourceful naval intelligence officer who served with 30 Assault Unit; Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale, the impeccably dressed MI6 officer associated with handmade suits, cufflinks and a Rolls-Royce; Conrad O’Brien-ffrench, an intelligence figure Fleming knew from his skiing days; and the flamboyant double agent Duško Popov.

Gus March-Phillipps has also been suggested as an influence. Henry Cavill played him in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which is rather ironic because Cavill has so often been named as an ideal Bond candidate. At 43, he may now struggle to fit reports that the producers want a younger actor capable of carrying the franchise for many years. We will come back to the current casting search shortly.

The important point is that there was no single actual Bond. Fleming described his creation as a compound of the secret agents and commando types he had encountered.

Bond was a composite. Fleming took courage from one man, elegance from another, ruthlessness from a third and professional experience from several more. Then, I suspect, he poured a generous measure of himself into the character.

Fleming also transferred his own enthusiasms and hobbies into the books: golf, gambling, skiing, fast cars, cigarettes, food, alcohol, travel, technology, beautiful surroundings and beautiful people. That is why Bond can savour an expensive meal while assessing the exits. He can admire the cut of a dinner jacket while calculating whether the man wearing it is armed.

Bond was Britain’s post-war fantasy

Now consider when Fleming wrote Casino Royale. He began it in Jamaica in 1952 and it was published in 1953. Britain was living with post-war austerity and rationing. Its empire was retreating, its economic strength was diminished, and the United States and Soviet Union were becoming the dominant global powers.

Bond represented a reassuring fantasy that Britain might be financially weakened but remained clever, courageous and lethally competent. The empire might be disappearing, but one superbly tailored British agent could still walk into any room in the world, order the best drink, defeat the enemy with a deck of cards and leave with the secrets, the money, the girl and perhaps a slightly dusty dinner jacket.

Fleming later gave Bond a detailed personal history: a Scottish father, a Swiss mother, childhood bereavement, Eton followed by Fettes, naval rank and service within the British intelligence establishment.

Few characters have been so comprehensively formed. Bond was conceived as a particular man, shaped by a particular class, particular institutions and a particular period of British history. He was male. He was white. He was British. He was a product of the establishment, and he possessed the confidence of privilege that came with it.

Yet he somehow became globally relatable. Millions of men have imagined being him. Generations of viewers have been seduced by his confidence, danger and style. Perhaps that universal appeal makes all of us feel that Bond could be remade in our own image.

Come on, gentlemen, admit it. At some point you have looked into a mirror and said, “Bond, James Bond.” You were possibly holding a comb and pretending it was a Walther PPK.

It is fantasy, but it still counts.

Britishness has never been just a skin colour

Now look at Britain in 2026. We have had our first British-Asian Prime Minister in Rishi Sunak. Black, Asian and mixed-heritage Britons occupy leading positions in government, business, entertainment, the arts, sport and the armed forces. And yes, they serve in the security and intelligence services too.

Britishness has never really been just a skin colour, and modern Britain makes that clearer than Fleming’s Britain did. A Black Scotsman is still Scottish. A British-Pakistani is still British. I am a British-born Pakistani. I am British. Swiss is a nationality rather than one fixed ethnicity.

Bond’s nationality, upbringing, education and institutional background could therefore remain recognisably Bond while his ethnicity changed.

So yes, a Black or Brown British man could play James Bond. At least in theory.

The difficulty is that Bond carries himself with the effortless confidence of a privileged white male. He can enter almost any place in the world and command the room. If Bond walks into a ballroom in a bow tie, he is treated like British royalty. If a Brown man wanders into the same ballroom wearing the same quality of tuxedo, somebody may hand him an empty glass and ask where he left the drinks tray.

When James Bond is captured by a global supervillain, he is rarely placed straight into a dungeon. He is bizarrely invited to dinner, wined and dined and, extremely helpfully, given a full briefing on the despot’s plans.

Why? Because the villain recognises Bond as a social equal. Even if the villain does not seek his approval, he is at least seeking Bond’s respect.

Bond’s privilege is part of his camouflage. His appearance, accent and confidence tell powerful people that he belongs in their world.

If Bond is anchored in a fantasy version of the contemporary world, a film cannot simply pretend that racism, prejudice and bigotry have ceased to exist. The same applies to sexism and misogyny, and some of that, let us be honest, can be found within Bond himself.

Loving old Bond films does not mean ignoring their problems

Sean Connery remains the definitive James Bond for many fans. Ian Fleming eventually warmed to him and gave Bond Scottish ancestry after Connery took the role, although he initially had doubts about the actor. Director Terence Young famously helped Connery acquire the clothes, manners and polish of the cinematic Bond.

When we revisit some of those early films today, parts of the sexual politics are deeply uncomfortable. I did not notice this nearly as much when I was younger, if I am entirely honest.

Watch Thunderball now. There is a scene in which Bond uses a nurse’s fear of losing her job to obtain sex after she has resisted his advances. That is sexual coercion. Viewed plainly, it is rape.

Across the Connery era, and to an extent the Moore era, there is a recurring presumption that Bond can have any woman he encounters, sometimes with considerable insistence.

Roger Moore is actually my personal favourite Bond. He was the one I grew up with, and I fell in love with the white Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me. It remains one of my all-time favourite cars because of that movie.

Now look again at Moore’s first Bond film, Live and Let Die. I have always enjoyed it and never used to think too deeply about the film or its racial politics. Step back and examine it today, though, and it is essentially about a white British super-spy defeating an almost entirely Black criminal organisation.

Many of the Black characters are villains. Rosie Carver, the Black CIA agent supposedly helping Bond, is secretly working for Kananga and betrays him. Black CIA agent Harry Strutter is murdered. Quarrel Junior, another heroic Black ally, survives, making him a notable exception because being a loyal ally to James Bond has never been a sound retirement plan, whatever your ethnicity.

Bond defeats the Black villains and then rescues Solitaire, a white woman, from them. Yes, he rescues a white woman from Black people. Think about that for a moment.

They have never actually touched her, which is another interesting dynamic. Bond, meanwhile, tricks Solitaire into believing that fate requires her to sleep with him by giving her a choice from a tarot deck in which every card is The Lovers.

Viewed through the bluntest modern lens, the film can resemble a white male supremacist fantasy. I stop short of declaring that this is what it is because I do not believe that was the conscious intention of the filmmakers. It was produced during the blaxploitation era and deliberately borrowed from that genre.

And I still really enjoy the film.

Both things can be true. You can love a movie without surrendering your right to examine its connotations. We can place it in its period and understand the context and assumptions behind it, while also recognising that all of this feeds into the DNA of James Bond.

Would Live and Let Die have worked in quite the same way if Bond had been Black or Brown? Would any of those films have worked if Bond had been a woman?

“Just walk about like you own the place”

There is a line that has stayed with me from David Tennant’s tenure as another famous British character, Doctor Who. In The Shakespeare Code, the Doctor says: “Just walk about like you own the place. Works for me.”

Well yes, I suppose it does.

Martha Jones is worried about walking around Elizabethan England as a Black woman, and the Doctor breezily reassures her with that line. He looks like an educated white man who expects to be obeyed. His confidence becomes his camouflage. Martha knows that the same trick offers her rather less protection.

When Ncuti Gatwa became the Doctor, the programme could examine that privilege from the other side. In Lux, the Doctor and Belinda arrive in segregated 1952 Miami and encounter the racial rules of that period. In Dot and Bubble, the Doctor saves the inhabitants of Finetime, only for them to reject his offer of escape. The episode leaves little doubt that their decision is rooted in racism. For once, being the cleverest, bravest and most important person in the room cannot make the room accept even the Doctor.

Britain today is experiencing renewed anti-immigration agitation, racial intimidation and open talk of “remigration”. We have seen footage of people of colour being chased and racially abused around demonstrations. We have heard crowds chanting “send them back”, while some activists talk quite openly about mass deportation.

For somebody who remembers the 1970s, aspects of this mood feel dangerously and horribly familiar.

That creates a serious creative question for a Black or Brown Bond. If he glides through every exclusive space without anybody questioning him, is that escapist fantasy or evasive writing?

Bond has always operated in fantasy, but his films are rooted in the contemporary era in which they are made. If you make him a person of colour, ignoring his colour would be a creative cheat.

Colour-conscious writing could make the character richer. Let him understand how he is perceived. Let him exploit prejudice. Let him wrong-foot somebody who underestimates him. Let him deliberately manufacture the authority that a white Bond receives automatically.

Every film does not need to become a lecture on race. The story simply needs to recognise the world its character inhabits.

When reinvention genuinely works

There are examples where this type of reinvention has worked.

Take Nick Fury. In Marvel’s original main comic continuity, he was white. The later Ultimate Marvel version was visually modelled on Samuel L Jackson. When Jackson played Fury on screen, he completely possessed the character. His voice, stillness, wit and authority made him look as if he belonged everywhere, including rooms occupied by gods, aliens and billionaires.

The Marvel universe helped to establish that power. Jackson made it unquestionable.

Then there is Sam Wilson, played by Anthony Mackie. Falcon began as his own character before inheriting Captain America’s shield, a change that caused resistance inside the story and among parts of the Marvel audience.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier confronted the question directly. What does it mean for a Black man to represent a country that has discriminated against Black people? The series used Isaiah Bradley’s history and Sam’s doubts to make race part of his transformation. Sam became Captain America through character, conflict and choice. The writing helped him earn the mantle rather than merely announcing it.

That is what I mean by colour-conscious casting. Think about what you are doing to the character. Give the actor the freedom to own the role. Give the story the courage to recognise that something has fundamentally changed.

Sometimes I watch period dramas in which actors of colour appear to have been inserted without any historical or fictional context. I find that unconvincing. History has repeatedly erased people of colour from its stories, so exclusion is hardly the answer. A production needs a coherent and informed approach. Empty box-ticking does not achieve that. A colour-conscious story that engages directly with the period can.

What is happening with the next James Bond film?

So what is actually happening with the Bond franchise now? It is worth cutting through the rumours.

Amazon MGM Studios closed its joint-venture deal with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson in March 2025, taking creative control of the James Bond intellectual property. Amy Pascal and David Heyman are producing the next film. Pascal has extensive experience with the Spider-Man films, while Heyman’s credits include Harry Potter, Paddington, Wonka, Barbie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Gravity.

Denis Villeneuve is directing, with Tanya Lapointe as executive producer, and Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight is writing the screenplay.

Villeneuve directed Blade Runner 2049, which I found nowhere near as compelling as the original Blade Runner. He also directed Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two. Personally, I hated Part One so much that I never watched Part Two, and probably never will.

Yes, I can hear Dune fans jumping onto their ornithopters and heading towards me already. Come on, I am allowed an opinion.

I have never watched Peaky Blinders either, believe it or not, but Knight also wrote SAS: Rogue Heroes, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The plotting and characterisation were strong, and the dialogue was wonderfully slick. I think that could be great for James Bond, so that gives me hope.

Casting director Nina Gold is leading the search for the next Bond, with auditions under way. Reports suggest the team wants a younger actor who can carry several films while retaining the grit, danger and psychological damage associated with the character.

Although I do wonder whether “grittier and more psychologically scarred” would count as a fresh direction. Daniel Craig already spent five films looking as though somebody had killed his dog.

No, wait. That was John Wick. You know what I mean.

At the time of writing, there is no confirmed actor, no confirmed title and no release date. Every actor currently being squeezed into a tuxedo by social media remains speculation.

Idris Elba and the commercial case against a Black Bond

Idris Elba recently challenged the optimistic case for a Black Bond. In a June 2026 interview with British GQ, he argued that some global markets would reject a Black or African man in the role. His advice was essentially to preserve the escapism and let Bond be Bond.

That is a serious commercial point. Bond is a global product. A studio spending hundreds of millions cannot pretend that audience prejudice, cultural expectations and franchise fatigue have vanished.

Market resistance, however, should be examined before it is automatically obeyed. Audiences were once subjected to the apparent horror of a blond Bond, remember.

Commercial caution can protect a franchise. It can also preserve assumptions long after audiences have decided they are ready to move on.

Elba has previously described how racial hostility made the Bond conversation around him “disgusting” and “off-putting”. That should give everybody pause. Debate an actor’s suitability, certainly. Reducing an actor entirely to his race tells us less about Bond than it does about the person doing the reducing.

Could James Bond be a woman?

A woman can lead a magnificent spy franchise. A woman can be lethal, damaged, seductive, elegant, rebellious and British. Cinema and television have already given us distinctive female agents and operatives, including Evelyn Salt in Salt, Eve Polastri in Killing Eve, Nomi and Paloma in No Time to Die, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s Nadia Sinh in Citadel.

Their existence does not settle the question. It exposes the opportunity.

Barbara Broccoli said in 2018 that Bond was written as a male character and argued for creating more female characters with stories designed specifically for them. I agree with that approach.

Bond’s masculinity is woven through his character: his relationships with women, his use of charm and sex, sometimes as a weapon, his emotional repression, his recklessness, and even his ability to move through the British establishment, particularly its older circles.

All of those emerge from a particular form of masculine hierarchy. The films can examine, criticise and modernise it, as the Craig era did. Removing it changes more than the colour of the skin. It changes the character.

Could a writer call a female character James Bond and make it work? Of course. James can be a woman’s name. A clever reinvention could explore her identity and the institution around her.

The creative question is what we gain by giving her that name.

If she has a different childhood, a different relationship with power, different sexual politics and a different experience of the world, perhaps she deserves a different name and her own mythology. Calling her James Bond would condemn an original female character to spend her entire existence being measured against an icon created as a man in 1952.

A female 007 feels like succession.

A female James Bond feels forced.

Doctor Who can regenerate. Bond cannot.

You might ask: what about Doctor Who?

Doctor Who operates under different rules. Regeneration allows the Doctor to change face, body and personality. The programme established that the character could also change sex, so Jodie Whittaker becoming the Doctor fitted its mythology in a way that a woman becoming James Bond would not.

Even then, her era divided viewers, although it would be unfair to blame that entirely on gender or on Whittaker. Writing, tone, production and the wider condition of Doctor Who all played their part.

Ncuti Gatwa has also left after two series. Disney ended its co-production arrangement, the BBC cancelled the proposed 2026 Christmas special, and Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf stepped away as production was put out to competitive tender. The BBC continues to say it is committed to the programme, but its next shape remains uncertain.

That does not prove that diverse casting killed Doctor Who. It demonstrates that long-established characters, mythology and audiences must be handled with care.

Familiarity can bend remarkably far. Bend it too far and it breaks.

Why change Bond at all?

This brings me back to the question beneath the entire debate. Why do we feel compelled to force a different gender, or indeed a different ethnicity, into James Bond?

I still believe a Black or Brown British man could play Bond convincingly. If an exceptional actor walks into the audition room and embodies the intelligence, danger, sophistication, sensuality and damaged British arrogance of the character, his ethnicity should not disqualify him.

But is the time right? If the process begins with a corporate instruction to change Bond’s colour as a marketing statement, the result will be tokenism in a tuxedo. That would be unfair to the actor, the character and the audience. It may also be a commercial failure.

As for creating other characters, we have proof that original heroes can become just as iconic. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt can go toe-to-toe with Bond in global recognition, extravagant action and increasingly alarming insurance premiums. Mission: Impossible built its own cinematic mythology around him, and it worked.

Bond’s films have repeatedly introduced women capable of carrying further adventures. Michelle Yeoh’s Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies was Bond’s equal in combat, courage and competence. Halle Berry’s Jinx in Die Another Day was developed for a spin-off that Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson supported before MGM pulled the plug, reportedly because the proposed budget had reached $80 million. Berry later argued that the industry was not ready to invest that amount in a Black female action star.

Then there was Ana de Armas’s Paloma. She appeared for little more than one dazzling sequence in No Time to Die and departed as one of the film’s most memorable characters: charming, funny, glamorous and lethally efficient.

Job done. More, please. Give her a spin-off!

Any of those characters, or a new agent inspired by what worked about them, could lead a fast, stylish and ferociously entertaining spy film.

Amazon MGM now has the resources and creative control to expand that world beyond one man. Instead of giving us a female James Bond, give us a female super-spy who can stand beside him, challenge him and become iconic in her own right.

The same opportunity exists for Black and Brown characters. Create agents with their own backgrounds, loyalties, weaknesses, methods and missions. Give them proper writers, proper budgets and the confidence to become more than supporting players.

Heck, create a whole Bond cinematic universe in which these agents occasionally come together.

Perhaps allow a few of them to survive as well. Bond has an alarming history of rewarding loyal allies with a moving final speech and an early appointment with the undertaker.

Strong representation does not require every hero to inherit the same name. Sometimes the more ambitious act is to create a new name that future generations will argue about.

The problem with “create somebody new”

There is, admittedly, a flaw in the line: “Why change Bond? Just create new characters.”

Original heroes rarely receive Bond-sized budgets, Bond-sized marketing or more than 60 years of audience affection. Telling under-represented creators to build something new can sound generous while every meaningful studio cheque and cinema screen remains dedicated to familiar intellectual property.

Representation carries particular power when somebody from a minority background occupies the centre of a British cultural institution. A Black or Brown Bond would say that this person belongs within British mythology itself, backed by the full weight of one of cinema’s greatest franchises.

At the same time, representation becomes truly durable when new heroes survive beyond comparisons with established white characters. Black Panther proved that. T’Challa became a global action icon on his own terms, without having to reinvent an existing white hero.

There is room for both approaches. Legacy characters can evolve where their foundations can carry the change. New characters also deserve serious money, talent, commitment and patience.

Why Jamshed Khan has to be Khan

This is where Jamshed Khan comes into it.

I first conceived Jamshed in 1996 as a comic-book character because I wanted a Pakistani secret agent at the centre of an adventure. To be completely honest, he did begin as a Bond spoof. Even while I was writing him then, however, I could feel him acquiring an identity of his own.

Today Jamshed Khan has his own history, loyalties and conflicts. In Silent Ruin, his battle is not simply against an external villain. At the heart of the story lies duty versus loyalty. His background shapes the choices he makes, the authorities he trusts, the people he protects and the price he may have to pay.

When I created Jamshed Khan, I wanted more than a Brown man occupying the sort of role traditionally reserved for a white hero. Representation cannot stop at changing the complexion of the person holding the gun.

Brownness is not a Pantone shade.

I wanted Jamshed to feel authentic to who he is. He is Pakistani and Muslim. The history, faith, cultural expectations, contradictions, loyalties and emotional baggage that come with those identities have to exist within the character, whatever mission he is undertaking.

I wanted readers like me to recognise something deeper than his face or the colour of his tuxedo: the way he understands duty, the people to whom he feels responsible, the lines he will cross, the lines he refuses to cross and the consequences when those loyalties collide.

Creating Jamshed gave me freedoms I could never have gained by writing an “Asian Bond”. If somebody had asked me to do that, I would have been forever negotiating with another character’s history and somebody else’s boundaries.

Jamshed can confront conflicts specific to him. He can carry his identity rather than pretend to be something else. He can fail in his own way and succeed in his own way. If readers choose to make him an icon, he can become one without forever being introduced as “the Brown Bond”.

Which, to be fair, I sometimes say at the moment. Marketing, eh?

Ultimately, that proves the point. Jamshed Khan could never simply be a Brown James Bond. Everything that gives him depth, distinction and authenticity makes him somebody entirely different.

He cannot be Bond.

He has to be Khan.

And yes, Silent Ruin is available now on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. I had to get that in!

My verdict: can Bond be Black, Brown or a woman?

James Bond could be Black or Brown.

Cast the right British actor. Preserve Bond’s intelligence, danger, sophistication, ruthlessness, masculinity and damaged arrogance. Write his ethnicity honestly and recognise how it changes his experience of the world. Then, theoretically, yes, it can work.

Honestly, though, it would be difficult. A casting decision driven by a corporate demand for a publicity-generating change could become tokenism in a tuxedo. That is unnecessary, unfair and commercially risky. The actor should get the role because he walks into the room and becomes unmistakably Bond.

A woman should not play James Bond.

She can be 007. She can be a fantastic British super-agent. She can outthink Bond, outfight him, replace him in the field and carry a global franchise. Give her an identity so powerful that she never needs to borrow his.

Bond is not a blank sheet. He is a specific character with a specific past, purpose and reason for being what he is. He can evolve. He must evolve. Yet evolution only means something while the character retains a recognisable core.

As Idris Elba put it: let Bond be Bond, and let Khan be Khan.

Now I want your verdict. Which single characteristic, if changed, would finally make you say: “That simply is not James Bond”?

Tell me in the comments and feel free to challenge anything I have said. This is a creative discussion, and good arguments help writers and creators think harder about the characters we inherit and the new ones we build.

Keep it thoughtful. Keep it civil. Keep it classy.

Suggested link on “Amazon MGM Studios now holding creative control”:
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-mgm-studios-james-bond

Suggested link on “Amy Pascal and David Heyman are producing”:
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/amazon-mgm-studios-james-bond-screenwriter-steven-knight

Suggested link on “June 2026 interview with British GQ”:
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/idris-elba-is-flying-solo

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