Exclusive: New James Bond Will Be A Person Of Color
According to our trusted and proven sources, the next James Bond will be a person of color and the search is already on.
This article is more than 2 years old
Sixty years and twenty-five movies in, the James Bond franchise has managed to adapt itself to pretty much every change that culture has thrown at it. If blaxploitation movies were getting popular, James Bond could star in Live and Let Die. If kung-fu movies were in the zeitgeist, The You Only Live Twice was there. Star Wars crushes the box office? Moonraker somehow happened. But according to our trusted and proven sources, James Bond is soon to make one of his biggest changes yet. It seems that the longtime stewards of the franchise are ready to finally pull the trigger and will cast a person of color as the British superspy, and are actively looking for a little-known actor to fill the role.
Every time a James Bond actor retires from the role, it is an event. There are whole gambling sites devoted to tracking the odds of who will be the next 007 in real-time, with the odds of Henry Cavill, Rege-Jean Page, and Tom Hardy constantly shifting. However, it seems a whole lot of actors who have been considered frontrunners can be dismissed out of hand. For one thing, we recently received word that there were specific age and height requirements that knocked a whole lot of the popular choices out. Now, we have word that producer Barbara Broccoli has decided that James Bond will finally make the leap and cast a person of color rather than the traditional portrayal of the actor as white, and also that they want a relative unknown to play the role.
For years, there have been calls for James Bond to break out of the traditional casting mold and hire an actor who is either a person of color, female, or both. Most of the time, British actor Idris Elba was by default included in that discussion. However, Elba has been clear that he not only feels he has aged out of the role, but he is actually pretty sick of being asked about it. Given that Barbara Broccoli is looking for a relative unknown to play James Bond in the hypothetical 26th movie, we can probably guess that Eon Productions is looking to do some kind of reboot. Any new casting of James Bond always leaves fans speculating whether this is supposed to be a hard reboot, the same individual who we are supposed to suspend disbelief about, or some new person taking on a code name. We do not know yet if they will make it explicit this time around, but it might be a good opportunity to.
It goes without saying that the decision to cast the next James Bond with a person of color will be controversial, to say the least. Although Daniel Craig was eventually critically praised for his portrayal of 007, a vocal contingent of fans were outraged that Eon Productions had cast a blonde person, when James Bond was described by author Ian Fleming as dark-haired. We will have to see what happens with the outrage this time.
