When it was first announced that Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the zeitgeist-tapping creator of Fleabag and Killing Eve, was working on the newest Bond film, most people assumed that part of her brief would be to address the franchise's antiquated approach to women.
This was, after all, the woman responsible for some of TV's funniest and most rounded female characters. In Fleabag and Eve Polastri, she created flawed but fearless women who never acted like ciphers, and certainly never needed rescuing by men. And then there's the tortured, self-doubting assassin Villanelle, who in a more just universe would be copy-pasted in as Bond's most interesting antagonist in decades.
But in an interview with the BBC, Waller-Bridge revealed that the Bond team were already addressing the spy's more misogynistic traits. "They were already doing that themselves," she says. "They're having that conversation with themselves the whole time. It was much more practical. Just, 'You're a writer, we need some help with these scenes. And you come up with some dialogue for these characters'." In the same interview, she also confirmed that her responsibilities lay purely in adding "little spices" to the script, not appearing on-screen.
It was originally Daniel Craig's idea to draft Waller-Bridge – he's since had to bat away accusations that she was a 'token' diversity hire, saying that her hiring was obvious because she's "fucking great" (no arguments here). But Waller-Bridge says that it was actually the franchise's producer and longtime guardian, Barbara Broccoli, who first got in touch. "We met for coffee and then a few months later we met again. And then I met the director, Cary Joji Fukunaga, and then I met Daniel after that. But I know Daniel and Barbara had been talking about it for while."
Waller-Bridge is, unbelievably, only the second woman to get a writing credit on a Bond film – Johanna Harwood worked on Dr No and From Russian With Love, and went uncredited for her work on Goldfinger. That said, perhaps that preponderance of Y chromosomes in the writers room is extremely believable, and goes some way to explaining why Bond's women have rarely had the kind of three-dimensional character treatment that's lavished on his colleagues and enemies (Judi Dench's M aside).
Not that we're saying we want a #metoo Bond, in which he goes toe-to-toe with the patriarchy. Just that it would be nice if Waller-Bridge helps pen a Bond film that we can enjoy without feeling a little bit icky afterwards.
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