(Credits: Far Out / Amazon MGM Studios)
Mon 5 January 2026 19:15, UK
It’s incredibly unlikely that any actor grows up dreaming of parading around in a skimpy outfit and being leered at by audiences around the world as the latest notch on 007’s bedpost, but it wouldn’t feel like a James Bond movie if there wasn’t at least one ‘Bond girl’.
Obviously, much like the franchise itself, the trope has evolved with the times. No longer are casting calls literally nothing other than women strutting around in bikinis before being told they’ve got the job based on nothing but how they look, and it’s safe to say that things will never be that way again.
For the first few decades, though, it existed somewhere between a double-edged sword and a poisoned chalice. Some ‘Bond girls’ thrived after sharing the screen with the current incumbent of the iconic role, others watched their careers slip away from them in the aftermath, and some even abandoned the industry altogether.
During the Sean Connery, George Lazenby, and Roger Moore eras, no performer would throw their hat in the ring for a plum female role in a Bond flick expecting lengthy monologues, character development, or even the remotest chance of being allowed to stretch their acting muscles, and that remained partially true during the Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan years, too.
With the benefit of hindsight, poor Denise Richards didn’t stand a chance, but one of her immediate predecessors decided to seize the bull by its outdated and misogynistic horns, and dial their character way past 11, not that Famke Janssen really had much of a choice when she was auditioning for a villain called Xenia Onatopp, a walking double entendre who crushed her enemies to death with her thighs.
At the time, she’d recently retired from modelling and was looking to break into acting. Janssen only had a handful of film and television credits to her name, so a major role in the most anticipated Bond movie in years could be the launchpad she was looking for, but it wasn’t without its inherent perils.
“I was very aware of the pitfalls of being a model-turned-actor-turned-Bond-girl,” she told The Guardian. “I thought ‘Bond girl’ was such a demeaning term. But I thought, ‘I have nothing to lose; if I do this, I’m going to go all the way.’” To accomplish that, she decided to exaggerate almost every aspect of her performance, because she “wanted to make a memorable character, not play her the way she was written.”
To do that, Janssen added several of her own flourishes. “Things like the way she’s so orgasmic,” she elaborated. “I grew up on Bond movies, because my dad used to like them, and so I always thought of them as comedies, as tongue-in-cheek. I thought, ‘Let me make this character unforgettable’. I went for broke. It easily could have failed. I don’t know where I got the confidence.”
She definitely went for broke, and it paid off, with GoldenEye turning out to be a career-making turn. Would that have happened had she not dialled up the “orgasmic” side of the character and placed her tongue in cheek? Who knows, but it was a risk that Janssen was willing to take.
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