Villainy has quietly become the most coveted seat in the James Bond reboot. As Amazon MGM tears the franchise down to its foundations under Denis Villeneuve, the hunt for a new 007 has turned every adjacent role into a prestige commodity — and none more than the antagonist, the part that has historically minted careers and stolen films out from under the men in the tuxedo. Saoirse Ronan understands that math. The four-time Oscar nominee has spent a decade proving she can carry tenderness on screen; now she wants a license to be cruel.

Speaking to Empire while promoting Bad Apples — the thriller in which she plays a teacher who takes a disruptive student captive — Ronan doubled down on an ambition she first aired back in 2024. “I said that I wanted to be a Bond villain and I’m dead serious,” she told the magazine. “I want to go dark.” Her pitch is pointed: not another femme fatale but “a young female villain,” a figure who, “especially for girls and women,” could “take all that pent-up anger and direct it somewhere.” It reads less like a casting request than a thesis about who gets to be dangerous on screen.

The notion is less far-fetched than a press-tour soundbite might suggest. Ronan already played a lethal teenager in Hanna, Joe Wright’s 2011 fairy-tale assassin story, and her recent choices — the addiction drama The Outrun, the wartime peril of Steve McQueen’s Blitz — have pulled steadily away from the luminous ingénue roles that made her name. A Bond villain would be the logical endpoint of that drift, and a franchise rebuilt for a streaming-era audience has every commercial reason to want a bankable, award-caliber woman as its face of menace.

There is an added irony the industry has not missed. The next Bond has yet to be cast — Villeneuve is directing from a Steven Knight script for producers Amy Pascal and David Heyman, with auditions still narrowing — and the current bookmakers’ favorite to wear the tuxedo is Jack Lowden, the Slow Horses star who happens to be Ronan’s husband. His odds firmed after broadcaster Richard Osman said on his podcast that Lowden was being “strongly considered,” even as no offer has been confirmed.

It leaves an unusually literal scenario on the table: one household potentially supplying both 007 and the woman engineering his downfall. Amazon MGM has spent the past year insisting it will rebuild Bond with “care and deep respect.” Ronan, for her part, has already decided which side of the gun she would rather be on.

Tags: casting, Denis Villeneuve, james bond, Saoirse Ronan, Jack Lowden

Saoirse Ronan wants to go dark as a Bond villain, while her husband is favorite to be 007

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