No Eve Moneypenny

17th January 2012

Although little has been revealed about her Bond Girl role in the upcoming "Skyfall", a lot of talk has been generated by the casting of Naomie Harris. Tabloids ran wild with speculation that the actress would be playing Miss Moneypenny, but Harris has finally put that story to bed.

Speaking to Live magazine, a supplement of the Mail on Sunday tabloid that still perpetuates the groundless claim she will be playing the MI6 secretary, Harris said: "The idea of me being Moneypenny was a good, racy rumour. But Eve is not remotely office-bound. She gets to see plenty of action. That meant a lot of gun training."

"I’m such a pacifist that I never thought I’d be excited about guns, but I absolutely loved it. The weapons training I’d done on Miami Vice was with real bullets, but this time I was shooting blanks. I did two hours three times a week for three months, mostly working with a Walther PPK, a very light, very beautiful, ladylike gun."

The media will inevitably compare her to glamorous Bond girls of the past like Ursula Andress, Jane Seymour or Halle Berry. "To be honest, I don’t think I’d be very good at such a role," she said. "What drew me to this was the opportunity to play a new kind of Bond Girl. We are Bond Girls who are multi-faceted, intelligent and capable," said Naomie of the roles herself and Bernice Marlohe will play in "Skyfall".

"It’s not just the women who have changed. James Bond himself has changed and Daniel Craig has been a very big part of that. He’s brought depth and humanity to the role. He’s so layered in a way that other Bonds just weren’t, because nothing seemed to touch them."

"Daniel’s Bond is very much touched by his relationships. In 2012, there’s a need to have female characters who are equal to that. Otherwise it would be totally imbalanced and no one would care about the relationships Bond has. I love the way it’s developed in that way. Those Bond Girls in the Sixties and Seventies might have been good back then but they wouldn’t be seen as very PC now. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that we’re going for a feminist take on the Bond Girl, because that has so many connotations to different people. But I would say that we are Bond Girls who are multi-faceted, intelligent and capable. In the past, the Bond Girls were all over Bond and didn’t have a life outside that relationship. That’s not the case in this film."

Epilogue
Despite Harris categorically stating in the interview that she will not be playing Moneypenny in the film, one tuned-out sub editor at the Mail still managed to slip the falsehood into her unrelated travel report from the Maldives, printed in the same issue of the newspaper.