“In the Bond audition, I was asked to unzip and drop the dress I was wearing, to just stand there in underwear,” Pike said. She was only 21 at the time. “I thought, ‘Well, no, I’ll be doing that if I get the part. I won’t be doing that now,'” she continued, sharing that she refused to disrobe. “I don’t know what possessed me.”
Pike got the part anyway, which begs the question of why this degrading process was needed for anyone in the first place. She went on to play Miranda Frost opposite Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry.
But while Pike decided to press forward with the franchise even after that audition, her experience does speak to Mirren’s purported distaste for the whole affair. While Mirren was never a Bond girl herself, she’s always been just a few degrees of separation away. Her cousin, the late Tania Mallet, starred in Goldfinger in the ’60s, and she’s acted opposite two 007s in Timothy Dalton (1923) and Brosnan (MobLand) throughout her career. Still, despite admitting that she would have liked to play a “fabulous female villain” in a Bond movie in the past, she now claims the films are “not my thing,” especially because she “never liked the way women were in James Bond.” Brosnan, for the record, is in “certain agreement” with his co-star’s gripes.
Of course, Bond is about to get a “fresh, exhilarating new chapter” in the hands of new owners Amazon MGM Studios. Hopefully this one won’t include any unnecessary undressing.
