It is a drag, and it is drag doing the gender work expected of 007.
One of popular media’s perennial questions, whether the role is currently filled or not, is “who will be the next James Bond?” It is a question reporters have recently been posing with increased urgency, and not only because the post has stood vacant longer than usual. In February 2025, Amazon MGM allegedly paid former Bond custodians Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars for the full creative rights to the James Bond franchise, which has so far generated twenty five films based on Ian Fleming’s novels. The deal, which came on top of the $8.5 billion Amazon had already paid to absorb Bond’s parent studio MGM, was the result of a protracted negotiation with Wilson and Broccoli over the future direction for the Bond brand under its new corporate owners. With a director (Denis Villenueve) and a writer (Steven Knight) now named, reports of possible lead actors have proliferated, with at least one of the supposed contenders already being asked to respond to casting rumors.
Part of what is at stake in these discussions, I want to suggest, is the renegotiation of which qualities are considered integral to a legacy character’s public identity. Many of the initial criticisms of Bond’s most recent representative, Daniel Craig (who played the character in five films from 2006 to 2021), focused on the ways his appearance differed from his predecessors.’ Martin Campbell, for example, who directed Craig’s first Bond performance in Casino Royale (2006), unfavorably compared his sexual appeal to those of past, and thus “traditional,” Bonds: “My only reticence with Daniel…was the fact that with people like Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan…they were all traditional-looking Bonds. All handsome guys, all sexy, all very attractive to women and so forth.”
In interviews, Craig himself often expressed degrees of discomfiture with the physical “so forth” expected of Bond. In 2017, shortly following the release of Spectre, Craig was asked by Time Out London whether he could imagine doing another Bond movie and responded that he’d “rather break this glass and slash [his] wrists.” In addition to the grueling exercise regime required to sculpt a Bond-like physique and the exhaustion of performing the part through intense shooting schedules, Craig pointed to the incongruence between Bond’s famously cool exterior and his own inner sense of self as a source of conflict:
It’s a drag. The best acting is when you’re not concerned about the surface. And Bond is the opposite of that. You have to be bothered about how you’re looking. It’s a struggle. I know that how Bond wears a suit and walks into a room is important. But as an actor I don’t want to give a fuck about what I look like!…I was aware of what was needed to be Bond but it still goes against everything I believe in. You’ve met me a couple of times, I’m not very cool. I’m not the coolest human being. I wish I was, but I’m not. And I don’t pretend to be cool. But playing James Bond, you have to be cool, and what the hell is cool?
This struggle with surface—and with an undesired social scrutiny aimed at determining whether the actor is successfully reproducing Bondness—is, according to Craig, a drag. One might even say Craig frames Bond himself as a form of drag: a performance that draws attention to the constructed nature of gender, with the potential to reveal its status as a series of copies in search of an original. What the hell is cool?
Taking my cue from his interviews, I have come to think of the discomfort and disassociation registered by Craig’s performance as dysphoric, in the sense that Craig’s approach to playing Bond makes palpable the constructed and compelled nature of the character’s masculinity. He is aided in his effort to register Bond’s drag by the transfictional nature of the legacy character. Transfictionality—that is, the dynamics of reception associated with characters who appear across multiple texts by different authors over time—invites comparative readings, and thus a querying and queering of Bond as a figure for what Matthew Bellamy has called “drone masculinity”: an ideology in which “masculinity, heterosexuality, trustworthiness, and the capacity to inflict and endure violence in the name of the state” are linked.
One of the qualities most enduringly associated with Bond in the popular imagination—cited on occasion in arguments for why the role should not be gender-swapped—is his penchant for womanizing, as evidenced by the revolving-door category of the “Bond girl.” During the scene in Casino Royale that introduces Vesper Lynd, the first love interest for Craig’s Bond, a game of competitive observation ends with Vesper suggesting, along traditional lines, that Bond sees women as “disposable pleasures rather than meaningful pursuits.” In previous interpretations, Bond certainly does seem to enjoy the dalliances available on the job, as he encounters a range of women whose names often index their status as serial sexual attractions. When in GoldenEye’s (1995) Pierce Brosnan’s Bond takes his psychological evaluator Caroline for a ride in his signature Aston Martin DB5, he smiles winningly as he shows off the size of his “engine” for Xenia Onatopp right before seducing Caroline with a kiss and a hidden bottle of champagne. Sean Connery’s Bond in Goldfinger (1964)similarly appears to romance Jill Masterson for the fun of it, or as a way of doubly triumphing over Goldfinger. Though Pussy Galore tells Bond later in the film that he can “turn off the charm” because she’s immune to it, she too succumbs to his advances and thus throws the other half of her statement into question as well: maybe Bond’s charm is too intrinsic to turn off.
Yet what strikes me as most intriguing about Craig’s performance is how little pleasure he seems to take as he engages in the seductions typical of 007. Instead of a suave sensualist, he gives the audience a Bond who treats the masculine, aggressively heterosexual gender performatives of the archetype as another weapon he’s licensed to carry. Casino Royale sets the pattern,as it opens with Bond earning his 00 status by making his first and second kills. In a flashback, Bond drowns the contact of a corrupt MI6 section chief in a sink, and the camera holds on a shot of Craig controlling his breathing and mastering the movement in his face. In live time, the section chief begins suggesting the second kill will not make Bond feel so much, right before Bond shoots him, facial expression now carefully neutral.
This pre-credit frame offers the audience a lens for reading Bond’s apparent coolness during subsequent acts of violence, suggesting that it is an attitude adopted through effort and repetition rather than a natural stance. And Craig’s performance work extends that frame to his deployments of charm. When Bond begins his first on-screen seduction, of a mercenary’s wife named Solange, Craig holds the muscles of his face strikingly still. When Solange demurs that she is not cruel enough to have sex with another man to spite her husband, Craig makes one, minute movement toward a smile and then holds it as he replies, “Perhaps you’re just out of practice.” As the two fool around on the floor of his villa, he pulls the smile periodically back onto his face, but only when Solange is looking at him: this form of cool too, Craig suggests, is something Bond has learned how to wield.
Such a frame reinflects, in particular, the moments when the Craig-era films reference previous franchise outings. The death of Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace (2008), for example, is staged as a visual echo of the murder of Jill Masterson in Goldinger, with the former drowned in oil while the latter was suffocated with gold paint. As they stand over Fields’ body, M reproves Bond by commanding him to “Look how well your charm works, James.” Yet the choices Craig has made in adopting the signifiers of that charm—in brusque line deliveries, utilitarian stripping, and a deliberately flat come-on, all of which contrast strongly with Connery’s debonair ease with Masterson—suggest that masculine appeal is as much an accessory to be donned and deployed as the other weapons Bond is required to turn over when M suspends him from duty. And in the micro-movements around his mouth that Craig quells as he prepares an expression of stoic indifference with which to greet Fields’ death, the audience receives an indication of the dysphoria that reproducing Bond’s hypermasculinity can provoke. It is a drag, and it is drag, doing the gender work expected of 007.
In his examination of Fleming’s novels and their cinematic adaptations, Bellamy argues that the characterization of Bond, including his status as “serially straight,” is inseparable from the anti-Communist and homophobic fervor that followed the high-profile defections of British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. In putting pressure on “seriality” as a formal mechanism for producing straightness as one of Bond’s signature qualities, I want to suggest that the Craig films also register a historical ambivalence: in this case, about weaponized masculinity in the context of early aughts’ perpetual war. Broccoli, in a 2020 interview with Variety, cited 9/11 as a synecdoche for the world-historical influences on their decision to cast Craig as Bond: “The world obviously had changed…We’d had 9/11, and the stakes were higher, and we felt we needed a more realistic Bond.”
Of course, one of the functions of a “realistic” Bond is to make claims about what exactly is real and obvious about the world and its hierarchies of power. And the world-historical “realities” constructed in the Bond films are vulnerable to particularly transfictional contestations, as Craig has indicated. Since stepping down from the role of 007, Craig has played a number of queer roles, including the gay detective Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out franchise (2019, 2022, and 2025) and a fictionalized William S. Burroughs in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer (2024). In an interview with EL PAÍS about the latter performance, Craig mentioned the difficulty it would have presented to take a similar role during his tenure as Bond: “It would have felt like a reaction to Bond, as if I was trying to make a statement. It would have felt too self-conscious. Also, at that time, I was playing Bond—there is a world in which that exists, and I was very protective and aware of it.” Craig frames Bond as the denizen of a straight world: an inhabitant not only of Fleming’s anti-Communist 1950s but also of that post-9/11 landscape in which straight white masculinity is both underwriter (the set of behaviors that invests the narrative with realism) and what is underwritten (the ideal whose claim to real-world referentiality is guaranteed by the narrative). But Craig constructs this frame in a way that implies that the fiction of Bond’s straightness must be protected: its seemingly fixed relationship to the character is not actually natural, as demonstrated by the implication that it requires a carefully calibrated degree of reflection to maintain (“aware” but not so “self-conscious” as to generate unease or discomfort).
In 2024, when asked to whom he would like to pass the Bond torch, a then-free Craig responded, with visible mirth, “I don’t care!” While Craig is (one suspects mercifully) finished with his on-screen labor for the franchise, the consequences of Bond becoming an Amazon property are likely to be numerous, and Craig’s work in the role will continue to influence the character’s reception. One of the creative differences rumored to have prolonged negotiations with Broccoli, for example, was Amazon’s desire to transform the Bond property into an extended universe on the model of the MCU or the Disney era of Star Wars: a move that would deepen the character’s imbrication in what Anna Kornbluh has recently quipped on Bluesky as “metastasizing IP.”
The deal also brings Bond into closer proximity to Jeff Bezos, one of the most visible representatives of the contemporary broligarchy. It is a suggestive conjunction. Not only are many corporate surveillance projects being undertaken with the kind of on-the-nose ill will a Bond villain might envy (“SPECTRE” has nothing on “Palantir”), but rhetorical appeals to reactionary, pro-tech forms of masculinity are once again a key tactic in selling the violence of necropolitics as a desirable good. As the “manosphere” goes looking for what the hell is cool, the potential of Craig’s performances to surface the constructed nature of the Bond template may offer one pressure point in a major franchise of masculine mythos.
Lauren Eriks Cline is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montana Western, where she teaches and writes about performance, narrative, and spectatorship. She is currently on season six of her annual rewatch of The X-Files and thinks “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” is a perfect episode of television.
Article photo courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.