A House of Dynamite star Rebecca Ferguson may seem to have an inside track on a role in Bond 26, given her connections to the project’s director Denis Villeneuve and writer Steven Knight.
But Ferguson insists she has not used those connections to land a role in the next James Bond movie, though she admitted in a recent interview with The Times that if the subject had come up with Knight while the two were working on their upcoming Peaky Blinders spinoff The Immortal Man, she might have lobbied for a villain role.
“I would have been pushing to play the baddie,” she said when asked if Knight was on-set when news broke of his being hired to write Bond 26 (the news was actually confirmed this July, months after the December wrap date of The Immortal Man).
The ever-candid Ferguson then gave her thoughts about the Bond series’ spotty history when it comes to female characters:
“We haven’t had a female Bond villain. I already said that to Denis — ‘female Bond villain, b–ch!’ He was like, ‘Oh là là.'”
There have been many female Bond villains throughout the course of the long-running series, but never has one risen to become an iconic main antagonist on the level of a Blofeld or Goldfinger. Ferguson suggests Knight may be the man to change this:
“I love the Bonds, most of them, but I often found that they weren’t very good at writing for women. [But Knight] wrote Maria [the Maria Callas biopic] for Angelina Jolie — he’s written loads of good female roles.”
Ferguson’s seeming Bond qualifications extend to her having major experience in the spy genre, after starring alongside Tom Cruise in three Mission: Impossible movies. Her time on that franchise did not end happily for her, however, as she related in a 2024 interview with WrapWomen’s UnWrapped Podcast (via The Wrap).
The Ilsa Faust actor said in the interview that she loved the character because she was a rogue element, and suggested the role got less interesting the more Ilsa became part of Ethan Hunt’s team. Ferguson also expressed dismay at the amount of down-time she had while shooting such big-budget, expansive productions:
“There’s a moment where you think it needs to be worth it, not just to love the character and to embrace Tom and [Christopher McQuarrie] and the story. I want to work, man. I want to work. I don’t want to sit in a trailer and know that there’s maybe coming a scene in [the middle of the] credits.”
Faust was killed off in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and therefore was not on-hand in this summer’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The possibility of a Faust spinoff movie has been raised to Ferguson in interviews, but she said she wouldn’t do it unless Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie, two very busy people, were involved.
She may be out on Mission: Impossible and Bond, but that doesn’t mean Ferguson is entirely done with that kind of movie. Indeed, her latest film A House of Dynamite, an apocalyptic thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow, puts her in a situation room role that would not be out-of-place in a Bond or Mission: Impossible or Bourne movie.
Ferguson has been confirmed for Dune 3, but her role is thought to be small.
