(Credits: Far Out / Amazon MGM Studios)
Mon 6 April 2026 18:45, UK
These days, actors are less reluctant to audition for a major female role in a James Bond movie because they go into the room safe in the knowledge that they probably won’t be used as nothing but eye candy.
Daniel Craig dragging the franchise into the modern, post-Austin Powers and Jason Bourne cinematic landscape meant that the archetypal ‘Bond girl’ didn’t really have a place anymore, and while there were admittedly several inconsequential conquests along the way, it was a far cry from the early years.
With the benefit of hindsight, Gemma Arterton knows that she didn’t get a fair share of the stick, but Eva Green, Léa Seydoux, Monica Bellucci, and Lashana Lynch all did to varying extents, and you wouldn’t expect Denis Villeneuve, a largely chaste filmmaker, to return to the days of Roger Moore’s arched eyebrow.
Obviously, things were very different in the 1960s, which is why the so-called curse of the ‘Bond girl’ gained so much traction. Enough women who’d spent a bit of time on 007’s arm saw their careers stagnate or dissipate to fill them with regret, with Lana Wood stating a strong case for nominative determinism when Diamonds Are Forever‘s Plenty O’Toole didn’t open too many doors.
She wasn’t a complete unknown when she was cast in the role, but she’d only recently stepped out of her sister Natalie’s shadow, and playing a prominent part in a James Bond flick was an opportunity that seemed too good to resist, even if hindsight will always remain undefeated, to the point that she’d basically retired from the screen by the early 1980s.
“I have heard of it, but I think it would take a cleverer person than me to work out if there was something to it,” Wood mused when presented with the idea of the ‘Bond girl’ curse. “But it is true that the Bond role didn’t open the doors I maybe thought it would. In fact, it didn’t open any doors at all.”
She’s partly got herself to blame on that front, though, with the actor turning down Karen Black’s role in the seminal Easy Rider. In a cruel twist, she instead opted to play a character called Karen in 1969’s Scream Free!, which also happened to be an American motorcycle-centric story and would have gone a long way to helping her overcome the main issue that plagued her in the post-Bond years.
“All I was offered were sexpot roles,” Wood explained. “And you can’t be doing those forever. I did suffer from being stereotyped. I remember once saying to a producer: ‘Think of me as the girl next door’. He said, ‘Honey, if you are the girl next door, you must live in a very racy neighbourhood.’”
She wasn’t the first ‘Bond girl’ to suffer from being wooed by cinema’s most iconic secret agent, and she wouldn’t be the last, but the fact that it happened so many times to several different actors across decades only serves to reiterate that being 007’s latest boudoir companion was one of the sharpest double-edged swords of its time.
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