Saoirse Ronan politely reminds everyone she’d like to play a Bond villain

“I want to go dark,” the Outrun star said this week, adding, “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.” 

Ronan’s desire to channel a uniquely female fury against a super-spy who, to be polite, has a questionable history with women, consent, and swaggering misogyny is the sort of fruitful dramatic tension the ever-reinvented franchise could benefit from. And the versatile Ronan’s certainly been giving her vision to be the next Blofeld or Dr. No more than a passing thought, as she told Vanity Fair back in 2024, “I do think there’s something kind of cool about having a female villain who wants to take him down and doesn’t just want to fall in love with him.”

Of course, Ronan already has at least a tangential connection to James Bond in her private life, as husband Jack Lowden (Slow Horses) has joined the long, long queue of hopefuls auditioning to take over the iconic role from Daniel Craig in Amazon’s Denis Villeneuve-directed continuation of the impossibly long-running action series. Regardless of who’s in the tux, however, having an actor of Ronan’s caliber match wits with 007 offers up the sort of tantalizing, unique possibilities the aged Bond franchise could use.