Idris Elba was wise to reject James Bond – politics is turning 007 into a spectre

Who, in all honesty, would want to be the next James Bond? Daniel Craig confirmed that the role is not the dream job it purports to be when he famously said, in 2015, that he would rather “slash my wrists” than return for a fifth outing. Granted, he did indeed return for a fifth outing, having added in that interview that he would do so only for the money, but the matter was then definitively resolved when his Bond was killed off at the end of No Time to Die. Now the frontrunner to replace him, Idris Elba, has ruled himself out of the race completely, saying that the conversation surrounding it has become racially charged – and not in a good way.

There’s no equivalence, obviously, between becoming a bit tired of being Bond and being racially abused for being in contention for it. One is acceptable, the other just simply is not. Yet Elba put his finger on a wider truth when he added during the chat that the choice of an actor to play Bond is “one of the things the whole world has a vote in”. Not literally, of course. It’s not Eurovision. All the same, James Bond is arguably the most glamorous and high-profile example of the increasing politicisation of casting, whereby the matter of who gets to play what role is decided not by which actor a director thinks is best, but by what the internet thinks the role should represent.

Some quarters, for instance, feel it’s high time Bond was played by a woman, or a Black actor, or another underrepresented minority (although, as a woman myself, I find the idea that feminism needs Bond to give it a hand by ditching a Y chromosome utterly condescending). Others, and this is me putting it kindly, seem to think Bond should remain stuck exactly as Fleming imagined him, perpetuating the myth of the supreme white alpha-male action hero in the process. Never mind that every actor who has played Bond in the past has reinvented him: that, after all, is acting.

Both arguments, of course, are wrong, although any argument motivated by racism or bigotry, which is hardly an argument at all but instead merely abuse, is the most wrong of all. Yet, while the two points seem unrelated, they are different facets of the same messy debate about cultural ownership that erupts with wearying predictability each time a classic role is recast. When the Black actress Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in the 2023 Disney remake of The Little Mermaid, the racist hashtag #notmyariel started trending on Twitter, evidently because certain people in the West who had grown up on the original cartoon, and presumably had nothing better to think about, couldn’t stomach the idea of a childhood hero (a water nymph, for God’s sake) being played by anyone who didn’t have white skin and crimson hair.

Naturally enough, the decision was also celebrated as a powerful step forward for diversity. On the other hand, when Steven Spielberg cast the American Colombian actor Rachel Zegler in the role of Maria in his 2021 remake of West Side Story, there were grumblings from various quarters that Zegler didn’t have a Puerto Rican bone in her body. In each case, the arguments point most of all to our confused relationship with fictional narratives, which no longer have the right to live freely as imagined constructs but must serve first and foremost as ideologically motivated cultural signifiers. In other words, casting has become a casualty of the imperative to reflect diversity, to prioritise lived experience, or, most egregiously, to preserve the myth of cultural whiteness. Pity the poor old character, lost somewhere in the middle. Authenticity versus meritocracy versus the so-called woke brigade versus the racists: it’s a right old mess we are in, and no wonder Elba wants no part of it.

Elba has other reasons for opting out of an iconic role that seems to become more politically charged with each passing week: he’s said many times before that he regards himself as an actor first and a Black actor second. Who would want to risk being celebrated more for what you might represent than for being the best man for the job? The regrettable irony in all this is that were Elba a decade younger, he probably would be the best man for the job: certainly, it’s hard to think of who would be better. Elba’s career won’t be the poorer for not including 007, but the franchise may well end up the poorer without him.