Angelina Jolie Once Turned Down Being a Bond Girl Because She Wanted to Be James Bond
Angelina Jolie had the opportunity to leave her mark on the James Bond mythology by becoming a Bond girl. But she turned the role down because she had a much grander role in mind.
Eva Green played the Bond girl in 2006’s ‘Casino Royale’
The 2006 film Casino Royale took the franchise in a different direction. Actor Daniel Craig would end up leading the franchise as a younger, and perhaps grittier James Bond than audiences had seen before. Eva Green ended up portraying Bond girl Vesper Lynd for Craig to partner with.
The actor was on board as soon as she read the Casino Royale script. Although she did have issues with the way others would pester her about the role.
“I got very angry when people kept asking me, ‘What’s it feel like to be a Bond girl?’ As if I was soup,” Green once said in an interview with The Guardian.
But Green was far from the first choice for Vesper.
Angelina Jolie once said she turned down being a Bond girl because she wanted to be James Bond
In the beginning, the studio behind Casino Royale was looking at other A-list actors for Vesper. According to Yahoo, Rachel McAdams and Charlize Theron were once considered to act opposite of Craig. Megastar Angelina Jolie was also a top choice for the role. She even received a personal invitation to do the part without an audition. But Jolie rejected the offer because she had another role in Casino Royale in mind.
“It started with a call from Amy [Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures],” Jolie once said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “She asked if I wanted to play a Bond girl. I said, ‘No, I’m not comfortable with that, but I would like to play Bond.’ We laughed, and then, about a year later, she called back and said, ‘I think I found it.'”
What Pascal found for Jolie was the role of action heroine Evelyn Salt in the titular movie Salt. For Jolie, the spy thriller was exactly the type of movie she was looking for.
“Salt is nothing like Bond,” Jolie once told Britain’s Mail (via Contact Music). “In so many films women are femme fatales and we wanted to avoid that. My character doesn’t use her sexuality to get anything. It’s the roughest I’ve looked. When we fight, it gets ugly. Somebody breaks my nose in the film. It’s not pretty.”
It also helped that, originally, Salt was written with a male actor in mind.
“I think when people write things for women – at least with the films I’ve done in the past, such as Tomb Raider – they’re not serious. They’re not raw. They’re not hard. So when we wanted a real female action hero, we looked towards something that wasn’t written for a woman,” she said.
Daniel Craig doesn’t think there should be a female James Bond
There was a point where the idea of a female James Bond inheriting the mantle from Craig was floating around the internet. But it’s a concept that many disagreed with at the time, including Craig himself.
“There should simply be better parts for women and actors of colour,” Craig said in a fairly recent interview with Radio Times. “Why should a woman play James Bond when there should be a part just as good as James Bond, but for a woman?”
