Jessica Chastain wants to play a Bond villain, all the yes
Jessica Chastain’s badassery knows no bounds. Whether she’s kicking butt and taking names on Earth in Zero Dark Thirty, in Earth/space in Interstellar, or in straight-up space in The Martian, Chastain brings ALL the grit and steel to her roles. So of course, it totally makes sense that the actress would want to play one of the most badass tropes in film history: the Bond villain.
As Chastain told W in a recent interview, after she burst onto the Hollywood scene in 2011 in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, she played a wide range of roles and that was sometimes a little perplexing for people. Yes, this is the actress who played the unstoppable CIA officer Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, but just a year earlier she was playing sweet and clueless Celia Foote in The Help.
“It did confuse people,” Chastain said. “I would hear, ‘Who is the real Jessica?’ a lot. I think of versatility as a good thing, but it does make it difficult for audiences to know you.”
Chastain is quick to point out in the interview that she believes there’s gender bias at play here.
“They rarely say that about men,” Chastain added. “They never worry about ‘knowing’ them. One of my goals is to play a villain in a Bond film. People ask me if I want to be a Bond girl, and I say, ‘No, I want to be the villain.’ I’m waiting for that call!”
In the world of Bond, female villains are few and far between. Though many of the femme fatales that flit their way through the Bond universe are categorized as “henchmen,” only two have been deemed “main villains”: Elektra King (played by Sophie Marceau), daughter of oil tycoon Robert King is considered a co-villain along with her father in the 1999 Bond film The World is Not Enough, and Colonel Rosa Kleb from 1963’s From Russia With Love, who is considered a co-villain along with head of global criminal organization SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. 24 Bond movies have been made since 1962, and on the villain front, it’s not exactly the picture of gender equality. A shakeup most definitely seems like it’s in order.
We are so behind the idea of Chastain as a Bond villain, we’re already getting the chills imagining her ace deliveries of those ice cold lines. We love how Chastain is on the hunt for the most powerful roles she can play and we would love to see the actress as the Big Bad who gives the next Bond (Idris Elba? A girl can dream) all the hell a Bond villain can dish.
Related:
Jessica Chastain has important things to say about how we sexualize female action stars
(Image via JStone / Shutterstock.com)
