About time we got a non-white Bond, even the British royal family has entered the Meghan Markle age.
“My name’s Elba, Idris Elba.”
That tweet sent fans into a frenzy about who could be the next James Bond. If Idris Elba is indeed the next Bond, it will be hailed as a big step for Elba, but a giant leap for the Bond franchise.
Elba once said that he’d “absolutely” do it if 007 was offered to him, but he hates the term “Black Bond”. As he put it “We don’t say ‘White Bond’ we just say Bond.”
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But this is not really an example of great colourblind casting as much as we might think it is. In an age when Marvel’s Black Panther showed us that black superheroes can rule the box office, the studios will surely bank on the race of Idris Elba to inject new life into old Bond. Filmmaker Antoine Fuqua recounted that Barbara Broccoli who has produced every Bond film since Golden Eye told him “it is time” for a non-white actor to take on the role. George Clooney told Variety that Elba “would be a great step forward”.
And about time too. Even the British royal family, where Prince Philip once called the Chinese “slitty-eyed”, has entered the Meghan Markle age.
Every Bond has been distinct, whether it was Sean Connery or Roger Moore or Daniel Craig. None have really tried to fit into the shoes of the other unlike say those playing Hercule Poirot over the years. In that sense, Idris Elba can stamp Bond with his own identity.
But can the studio radically reinvent Bond with Elba inhabiting the role or will this be the same Bond, just in a different colour? Bond has always been about boys with toys. No one looks for a postcolonial analysis in Octopussy. So will Elba’s blackness mean anything? Or is this the kind of blackness that studios can digest where he is exactly like White Bond but just a darker shade of pale.
But at a time when Donald Trump denigrates the intelligence of African American stars like LeBron James and Black Lives Matter polarises America, does a Black Bond matter if his blackness does not go beyond skin-deep? Black Panther was not just Superman coloured black, it was also a commentary, admittedly within superhero parameters, about colonisation and Black Power.
That is where the Bond quandary lies. Bond never had much of a back story. His parents’ graves appeared only in film 23. We cannot shoehorn a racial identity onto Ian Fleming’s creation. Yet Elba’s race has to count for something. Studios don’t like big budget risks. It has taken Hollywood 25 years since Joy Luck Club to make Filthy Rich Asians, an all Asian ensemble film. When it comes to a winning formula like Bond, studios at best want to make sure that the franchise is shaken not stirred.
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On the other hand, it raises intriguing questions about the limits of colourblind casting. Would those cheering for an Elba be as gung-ho about an all-white Ramayan? The problem with “colourblind” casting is that it goes one way too often and one way only. Thus Exodus: Gods and Kings is whitewashed. Tilda Swinton becomes an old Asian man in Doctor Strange. But few Indians get to play white roles.
Priyanka Chopra as Alex Parrish in Quantico is one exception. It was conceived with a white character in mind before she bagged it. As Aseem Chhabra writes in Priyanka Chopra: The Incredible Story of a New Bollywood Star, they even toyed giving her a more desi name like Asha. But she stayed Alex. Her ethnicity is almost incidental until Indians protested a Hindu terrorist storyline. One of its writers, Bangladeshi-American Sharbari Zohra Ahmed tells Chhabra, “My American side is happy that she wasn’t exoticised but my desi Bengali side feels like we had an opportunity here and I feel that we could have done more to push the diversity ball.”
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In one sense one could say Quantico jumped across the colour barrier to an ideal world where race and ethnicity did not define a character and white is not the default. And PC fans can boast that when it comes to a person of colour inhabiting a role written for a white person, we can claim our Priyanka did it before any Elba-come-lately.
Elba as Bond forces us to confront the idea that being British is not the same as being white. That this idea should be considered radical at a time when the Mayor of London is a man named Sadiq Khan is rather sad.
Bond fed into a British nostalgia for a time when they still felt like a superpower. Brexit punched a hole in that facade. It will be interesting to see what this new Bond could mean for this new Britain. He will still be on Her Majesty’s Service and save the day, but she will have to get used to not having a white knight in shining armour anymore.
Sandip Roy is a journalist, commentator and author.