It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
Ethnicity is NOT Nationality, ffs. Are we discussing this and confusing these two? Really? Nationality is the relationship between a person and the political state to which he or she belongs or is affiliated. Ethnicity is the identification of a person with a particular racial, cultural, or religious group.
One thing is to tinker, as you say, with nationality. Having a Scot play an English is like having a Portuguese actor play a Spanish role. Or a French actor play an Italian. Other thing completely different is to tinker with the ethnicity of a character. A black person playing a white character is just ludicrous.
You can fake an accent, but you can't fake an ethnicity, unless you're RDJ in Tropic Thunder ;) And before you say Connery didn't fake the accent. He never could, in any role. It's his fault as an actor. He played a Russian Submarine Captain with a Scots accent :)
Stop confusing things. Bond is a white male. He's other things that can be faked. But you can't fake that.
Then casting a British actor for the part doesn't mean casting a white one. Today it is more important that Bond be British and male then white, because today those are far more important markers of Bond's identity than his skin color. The world has changed and the series has always changed with it. There are far more important factors in choosing the next Bond than the color of the actor's skin.
And that's one opinion, as is feeling that Bond should remain a Caucasian; it's a preference not a prejudice.
Then you didn't understand me. I'm saying one should respect the markers the writer gave to his character. Some markers can be faked, some can not. Faked, not changed. Cast an American actor to play an English character, if you will. But the character must not be American. It must be English. The character is white. You cannot cast a black actor to play a white character. You can cast a Swedish or American actress to play Lara Croft (Vikander and Jolie) but the character is a white woman. They can't cast Lupita Nyong'o to play Lara Croft because she cannot play a white woman. She can play an english one, but not a white one. The same way you can't cast Pierce Brosnan to play Django, but he can pretend to be an American character, like say, a Texan. I can't, for the life of me, understand why this is hard to grasp.
He'd have been my choice as well. Very dashing and suave.
This discussion has got me to ponder: hypothetically if Bond were cast with an actor of a different ethnic background, would continuation authors then change Bond's ethnicity in the novels to match the current actor? Officially making the literary Bond a person of African, Asian, South American etc descent? I recall Benson making M female to match the trend in the Brosnan films.
James Bond is white because he was British and at the time he was created one implied the other. Today it is accepted that someone can be non-white and British. It isn't disrespecting Fleming to cast a non-white actor in the role if that actor is British and proud of it. That is more important to Bond's core identity than skin color, which is no longer a mark of Britishness.
Casting a non-white actor as Bond wouldn't work if you were planning an period adaptation of Fleming's Live and Let Die, but that won't be happening anytime soon. Bond movies are 21st century movies made for a modern audience in multi-cultural and multi-racial countries. I am not one of those Guardian editorializes who insist the next Bond must be non-white. But if he was it wouldn't bother me either. There are some aspects of a character's identity that are constant and some that grow less relevant as times change, especially if you're making movies that are not set in the past.
Until relatively recently it was standard practice for Hollywood to make many British literary characters American when they hit the big screen. Disney did it for years. The belief was that US audiences were less likely to go and see a film with British accents. Even Winny the Pooh became a US citizen.
Believe it or not J.K. Rowling had to fight quite hard with Warner Brothers to keep Harry Potter British. It was one of her red lines when selling the movie rights.
Until Black Panther Hollywood also struggled to get its head around the idea of a film with a predominantly black cast being a commercial smash. Black actors meant minority interest as far as the studios were concerned.
There are no hard and fast rules. I have no doubt there will be a black Bond one day. And when it happens people will wonder what all the fuss was about.
There have been black Britons since at least the 17th century - doubtless longer. How long do their descendants have to wait before they're recognised as British?
And just to add to my previous point about Bond casting. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that with producers other than the Britophile Cubby and Harry, there would have been a significant risk that Bond would have been turned into an American CIA agent. We know this could have happened because when CBS adapted Casino Royale for the TV in the States, they made Bond American and Leiter a Brit. Obviously it would have been much worse had they made Bond a black British character... much, much worse. ;)
Pierce Brosnan suggested Colin Salmon as a potential Bond...
I think Salmon's contribution to the franchise didn't help his chances. Can't imagine Eon would want Salmon as Bond. He played a supporting character so I doubt they'd have wanted to give him the Bond part. Would have been unlikely.
Sorry, but they don't fly for me. If I write a character in a given way, I want it to be depicted in that fashion forever. Writers strive on eternity, not context. Only poor writers or intervention writers strive on context.
But listen, you guys champion for whomever you want. That's what being a fan is all about.
Oh well, here's a chap that could be Bond.
Hypothetically, that would maybe depend on whether it's present day set Bond novels or not. Anthony Horowitz writes his novels within the Fleming timeframe, and I couldn't imagine a novel set in the 50s/60s featuring a Bond with a different ethnic background.
Whenever I have the misfortune to watch Cavill in action I'm reminded of the famous exchange between Dennis Pennis and Hugh Grant, where (commenting on Grant's 'woody' acting) Pennis asked him: 'How do you get yourself psyched up, I mean, do you go into the forest and sort of stare at a few trees?' 😂😂
Who would make a better modern day Poirot? David Suchet or John Malkovich?
One would be deprived of its ethnicity, and the other would be deprived of its defining characteristics. So, obviously, no matter when the time and circumstances of the adaptations, Sanada and Suchet would be better suited for the characters.
For the sake of it, who would have made a better Bond, a good actor who looks nothing like the character, or a reasonable actor who is its spitting image?
I know who I'd choose. But hey, @Getafix, I thought you were in favour of a good Bond film, not an award winning one (Skyfall). Oh, btw, I've seen this and I thought of you, old pal (
Thought you'd enjoy it. Lets not derail the thread, though ;)
So, to answer your question, Cavill, no doubt about that. Now, I'd love to see a good spy thriller with Elba, I really would, as I really like the guy. But he doesn't look like Bond, just as, say Hiroyuki Sanada doesn't either.
If you're a symbol for the commonwealth on the other hand it doesn't make too much sense if you're black.
I would prefer him over Idris Elba
If you're talking about the cultural makeup of London and England changing and losing its English character then that's a different point entirely and not related to Fleming's original character as written on the page. Also, it's not as if Fleming was writing Bond as a white working class Englishman, either. He was very specific when he stated his white upper-class English roots. Using Connery's working-class Scottishness as a reason to cast someone today from African descent is ridiculous as it is political. That's one helluva leap in logic to make. Why? Because it's not a stretch to accept that if Connery can adopt the correct mannerisms and style of the white upper-class, he can make it believable that he's an English gentleman from Eton. I realise you didn't say that @Revelator and that was another member, but I don't really want to answer everyone individually. I'm sure @Getafix prefers to call himself a European rather than English as that's the politics that tends to blight our country nowadays.
Your own argument is that because our country is now multi-cultural and diverse, we should accept ethnic changes to our own folk heroes, probably because the BBC have been adopting this now self-imposed rule recently in their dramas. The term multicultural refers to many separate cultures co-existing together, though it still makes the distinction of there being individual cultures to begin with. I put it to you that being white and upper-class has its own distinct culture that is entirely separate even to our own white working-class, which is why Ray Winstone or Danny Dyer wouldn't make for a very convincing Bond. Connery was different, he was groomed by the refined Englishman Terrence Young, as @Univex eloquently stated, and Connery just about pulled it off. Fast-forward 50 years and Bond has been played by 6 different actors and all of them of the same ethnic make-up and well established they are too, but they played him as an English gentleman. Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan were in fact playing the exact same character, and "no" it wasn't a code name. The only way you can change Bond to someone from a Sierra Leonean background is if you buy into the code name theory and no longer have the character as an upper-class Englishman. It really comes down to that. If that's how you want your Bond to be portrayed then I guess that's fine, but you'll be in the minority, and cast doubt on your own sincerity as a bonafide Bond fan.
If you really want to bring other ethnic groups into the equation then perhaps Bond should be played by someone of Indian (Asian) descent as they happen to make up far more of the population than Afro-Caribbeans do, if that's your argument. I really don't know what is your argument to be honest.
I saw that he has filmed his final series of Poldark too? Only time will tell?
Connery is clearly Scottish in all his films. Connery couldn't pass as English if he tried! He's so Scottish that Fleming created a Scottish-Swiss ancestry for Bond.
Yes Fleming conceived of Bond as English but when Cubby and Harry cast Mishter Bond, Fleming changed his ethnicity.
Keep up!
Dalton was never really Welsh either - that's total nonsense. I think he might have been born there but he grew up in Derbyshire and went to school in Manchester I think. His natural accent is north west English. It comes out a lot in LTK.
And yes I'm very happy to describe myself as European, as well as British and English. What on earth is your problem with that? Aside from anything else they're statements of fact. It's an unavoidable geographical truth that the UK is a European nation.
No he didn't. He changed his background story. Still, in all the books he's got dark hair, blue eyes, he's handsome in a ruthless way, about six feet tall and has a scar on his right cheek.
Now some of that is superficial (scar, eye-colour), but it makes a heck of a lot of difference if he'd be changed in a 72 y/o lady from nagorno karabach. Would the biggest problem be beeing a lady? Beeing 72 y/o? Or his ethnic background. Already with Craig people were complaining he looked like a Russian thug and the man's English himself.
Could, or perhaps should there be a carribean-background 005 or 009? Why not? But why change the protagonist so fundamentally that all connection to the past is lost? That makes no sense at all.
Couldn't agree more, @CommanderRoss.
I am willing to bet that Eton's student population has not been all-white for many decades now, and that there is class variation among Britain's minority population. So the class argument against casting a non-white actor doesn't work. I wouldn't mind if Bond was played by an English actor of Indian (Asian) descent, since that demographic is indeed more numerous than that of Afro-Caribbeans. Class and nationality can and often do transcend race, and skin color is no longer an instant marker of class or nationality in England or America.
As at @Revelator pointed out, yes he did.
Fleming's Bond is technically not even English. Scots Swiss. And that's because Fleming created a back story to keep pace with EON's really quite extensive reimagining of the character.
So for Fleming 'purists' the news is just in - they've been tweaking the character in the films since day one.
In fact screen Bond is so not English that out of the 6 actors to play him only 2 were English (if you buy the 'Welsh' Dalton thing).
https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a28231970/poldark-series-5-aidan-turner-james-bond-style-spy/
Can't remember Craig looking as intense/menacing as this. Well perhaps when his bits got smashed in CR...