Most people take one look at actor Idris Elba and intuit that the star of “Luther” and “The Wire” is a very sophisticated guy not lacking in the charisma department. Scratch beneath the surface, and you find an actor of incredible range and distinction.
These would be considered indispensable qualities for any actor cast as James Bond, the most iconic of franchise movie heroes. To date, six actors have played the fictional MI6 superspy, but Mr. Elba, if signed, would be the first actor of color to say, “My name is Bond … James Bond.”
Pop culture aficionados will remember a brief moment in 2008 when Sean “P. Diddy” Combs nominated himself for the role while filming an “audition reel” that also hawked a line of men’s cologne. Though the rap mogul surrounded himself with the props of the spying life — blondes, a yacht, a casino and all manner of capitalist excess — no one could seriously envision giving the keys to Bond’s Aston Martin to this guy.
Hollywood is crawling with actors who superficially look the part, but it takes a certain “je ne sais quoi” to play James Bond. Ironically, Bond’s creator in 1953, the late author Ian Fleming, originally conceived of his iconic character as a “dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened.” To say James Bond has evolved since the first year of the Eisenhower administration would be an understatement.
One of the fascinating tidbits to come out of the brouhaha surrounding “The Interview” and the computer hacking that disseminated embarrassing studio emails was a suggestion by Amy Pascal, Sony Pictures Entertainment chairwoman, that when Daniel Craig’s contract expires at Columbia Pictures, “[Mr. Elba] should be the next Bond.”
Yes, this champion of color-blind casting at a rival studio is the same Amy Pascal who engaged in crude racial stereotyping about President Barack Obama’s probable taste in movies. She bantered with a producer about whether “The Butler,” “Django Unchained” and Kevin Hart’s movies were the kind of films Mr. Obama watched.
In one condescending email exchange, two powerful Hollywood “liberals” illustrated how an entire industry run by Democrats could still be a fortress of institutional racism well into the 21st century.
It is ironic that one of Mr. Elba’s biggest boosters is someone who, at least in emails, expresses something less than respect for black artists or their cultural output. Still, Ms. Pascal gets some credit when it comes to seconding Mr. Elba’s obvious qualifications for the role.
Ms. Pascal’s email would’ve eventually disappeared into the Hollywood ether after a few days if the prospect of an Afro-Anglo James Bond hadn’t outraged talk radio host Rush Limbaugh’s sense of literary and cinematic purity.
“He was white and Scottish. Period. That is who James Bond is, was,” Mr. Limbaugh said recently in echoing similar pronouncements by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly about Jesus Christ and Santa Claus. He was appalled to hear others suggest “the next James Bond should be [Mr. Elba], a black Briton, rather than a white from Scotland, but that’s not who James Bond is,” he said, acknowledging he was probably “racist” to point it out.
Never mind that of the six actors who have played Bond since the franchise began in 1962, only Sean Connery was Scottish. The others have been Australian (George Lazenby), English (Roger Moore, Craig), Welsh (Timothy Dalton) and Irish (Pierce Brosnan), though all are white. Mr. Elba is not white.
One suspects that Mr. Limbaugh didn’t have a problem with those other actors because he can’t imagine, even in a multicultural world, that a black man can come from Scotland. He sees Mr. Elba’s potential hire as the next 007 in terms of a black guy taking a more “qualified” white guy’s job.
A similar debate about Mr. Elba broke out a few years ago when Marvel/Disney announced that he would play Heimdall in the “Thor” franchise. Purists complained that a “black god” as the guardian of the mystical Rainbow Bridge was ridiculous until they realized that getting hung up about the color of fictional Norse gods was ridiculous and racist.
Meanwhile, Mr. Elba is having fun with all the speculation, though he hasn’t been formally offered the role. Given Hollywood’s racial hypocrisy, he’s too smart to be shaken, or stirred, by the fantasy that he’s any closer to saying “My name is Bond ... James Bond” than P. Diddy was on his best day.
Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631; Twitter @TonyNormanPG.
First Published: December 30, 2014, 5:00 a.m.
