Pierce Brosnan is right: We deserve a female James Bond and now is the perfect time

It’s 2019, can we please give up the fiction that James Bond has to be a man? It’s time for the franchise to evolve – and give us a female superspy.

Former James Bond Pierce Brosnan played the famous 007 four times, but now thinks that it’s time for the franchise to move forward – with a woman.

Yes, Brosnan is officially in favor of casting a female Bond. And he’s completely right, by the way.  It’s well past time.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Brosnan was quite clear – and emphatic – about his reasoning.

"“Yes!” he enthused. “I think we’ve watched the guys do it for the last 40 years. Get out of the way, guys, and put a woman up there. I think it would be exhilarating, it would be exciting,” he said."

Sadly, however, Brosnan also notes that such a change is unlikely to happen while the franchise remains under the control of its current producers. Sigggggh.

Lashana Lynch may have been named as the new 007 in upcoming Bond 25 film No Time To Die – but notice that everyone involved has been very careful not to refer to her as any sort of new “James Bond”. This of course may be a fake out, to cover for the fact that the folks behind the franchise have decided to get modern all of a sudden. More than likely, however, it’s just meant as a sop to those asking for better female representation in these movies without anyone having to make any real changes to the womanizing, problematic man at their center.

Which, okay, fine, that’s progress, I guess. Sort of. But audiences deserve better – and so does the character, if we’re honest. It’s 2019. Isn’t it time for James Bond to evolve a little bit too?

Also, don’t the women in the audience finally deserve some Bond Boys for once? I mean. Come on. Fair is fair!

If we’re honest, another British import has already shown us the path forward on this issue – in more ways than one. Doctor Who finally cast a woman as the Doctor for the first time in its fifty-some odd year history in 2017, and though there were some growing pains associated with the switch the end result has generally been quite solid. (Whitaker’s Thirteen, for what it’s worth, is fantastic.)

So, Whovians have already shown us that legacy male characters can be reimagined as female, if given the right story parameters and enough will. The thing is, Doctor Who has a built in reason for its lead to switch ages and genders whenever it’s convenient – the concept of regeneration. Since the Doctor is an alien, the powers that be can basically fanwank that this particular species regenerates into a new form when it gets too close to death. And, as Time Lords are aliens, they’re clearly not as bound by humanity’s rigid rules and ideas about things like gender as we are.

Let’s give the Bond franchise the same opportunity.

It’s honestly already halfway there anyway. Over the years, seven different men have played James Bond. The movies have never bothered to explain how or why this happens. In fact, most of the time, the films behave as though we’re not supposed to notice things like Roger Moore suddenly turning into Timothy Dalton. If you think about it too hard, it feels incredibly lazy. There’s no way all these guys are the same person, and that feels worth acknowledging on some level.

The easiest way to give us the female Bond we deserve is just to admit that the identity of James Bond has always been made up. It’s simply a title, passed along from agent to agent, just as 007 already clearly is. You can make up whatever reason you want for this particular necessity – the job is too dangerous, the identity of Bond strikes fear into the hearts of bad guys, in order to really commit to this job you must give up everything that makes you, you, etc. etc.

After all, part of what made Skyfall so interesting was how much it dealt with Daniel Craig’s Bond as a person, in a way these films normally don’t bother with. Now, imagine if we got that with every incarnation, because we’re all admitting that these are different people with different experiences? What stories these films could tell!

Basically: Sign me up right now.

This can still be a franchise with something to say. But it’s time to let Bond change, the way every other classic institution has done.

No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s (allegedly) fifth and final appearance as Bond, will hit theaters in April of 2020.