Gemma Arterton re-writes her role in 'Quantum of Solace' with #MeToo in mind
Gemma Arterton has taken stock of her role in the Bond movie Quantum of Solace, re-writing her part for a new book.
The British actress made her breakthrough in the second Daniel Craig outing as 007 in 2008, playing consular employee Strawberry Fields, when she was just 21.
However, she also fell foul of Bond’s lascivious ways.
So in Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (And Other Lies), published this week, she’s righted a few wrongs in a fictional diary entry.
Introducing the entry, she writes that ‘I’ve written this short story which I could get in so much trouble for. It’s called Woke Bond Woman and it’s about what my Bond girl should have done.’
In it, she rebuts Bond’s advances, after noting his ‘smarmy comment’ on meeting him.
“I’m not interested in flirting with you – I’m here to work,” she writes.
“’No thank you,’ I say. Maybe he is attractive, but he’s at least 20 years older than me, we’ve only just met, he’s a colleague.
“Plus this man has a reputation. Don’t women who go up to his hotel room and sleep with him usually die in some horrific yet iconic way? No, no. Not me.”
Bond then notes that she is ‘uptight’, and adds that sleeping with him could further her career.
“No thank you Mr Bond,” she replies, before leaving the hotel in La Paz, Bolivia ‘unharmed’.
‘Unharmed’ is what she didn’t end up in the movie, after she was drowned in crude oil by the shadowy organisation Quantum, as a throwback to Goldfinger.
She’s since said that she would ‘pass’ if she was offered a Bond girl role today.
“I don’t want to slag off that film, because I really enjoyed it – I was 21, and it was a trip. But would I do it now? No,” she told ES Magazine in 2017.
“For the first seven or eight years of my career, I was doing stuff because I thought I should, or I thought I was lucky to get that part.
“And I am grateful — it set me up… But it sits really badly with me when I make something I’m not proud of, or doesn’t say what I want to say.”
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