Saoirse Ronan has eaten her words about playing a Bond villain — right as her husband became favourite to play Bond
In 2024 she told Empire she wanted a young female villain who threatens Bond rather than seduces him. Jack Lowden is now in the betting.
Right, this one popped up in 007 circles and it's got a bit of a twist. Turns out Saoirse Ronan—who, not so long ago, was making it known she fancied herself as the next big Bond villain—has started walking back some of those earlier comments. You might remember headlines last year touting that she was desperate to play someone with a genuinely dark side and, get this, to go up against Bond, not chase him. Now, she's already changing her tune, and the timing's odd: her husband, Jack Lowden, has suddenly become the favourite to don the tux and take on the spy gig himself.
She told People: "I've eaten my words after saying that now."
Changing Tunes and Bond Rumours
Not that long ago—2024, if you can believe it—Ronan was in full PR mode about why she should be the next Bond big bad. She told Empire that she wasn't joking around and wanted to play a really complex, even twisted, character. The idea was to embody the sort of bottled-up frustration a lot of women apparently feel (her words), and to let a villain loose who doesn't bother with seducing Bond but is instead genuinely threatening in her own right.
Here's Ronan, laying out her pitch for Empire magazine: "I think it would be really interesting, having a young female villain. Especially for girls and women, to see someone who can just take all that pent-up anger and direct it somewhere, there's something interesting about that dramatically. So I would love to do more of that."
Her timing might've made things a bit sticky—Jack Lowden, her husband, is now in the betting pool for the next Bond. Bit weird, that, if you ask me; who really wants to act out that husband-vs-wife showdown on an actual blockbuster set?
Bonds vs Bond Villainesses
Ronan's earlier vision wasn't exactly plucked out of nowhere. The Bond franchise has dabbled with female villains before, though not exactly often. Grace Jones did it first in A View to a Kill back in 1985 with May Day. Then you had Famke Janssen making a proper impression as Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye (1995), and Sophie Marceau as Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough (1999). Still, Ronan seemed keen to up the ante, and go even more psychological with it—until, apparently, she changed her mind somewhere along the way.
The odds are likely shifting for both Ronans in the 007 universe, and it's rare we get what feels suspiciously like a couple auditioning for MI6 together.
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