Pam Grier Turned Down Playing ‘Octopussy’ Bond Girl: She’s ‘an Afterthought’
Samantha Bergeson
Pam Grier waits for no man, not even James Bond.
The iconic “Foxy Brown” star revealed she turned down a role in 007 installment “Octopussy” alongside Roger Moore.
“My agents had me meet with [producers] the Broccoli family, and I’m going, ‘I’m not available,'” Grier told Entertainment Weekly. “They looked at me and said, ‘Well, why are you here?’ I go, ‘I don’t know. My agent told me to come meet.'”
Grier continued, “I just felt to be a Bond girl would be: What am I going to do? Am I going to help rescue him? Is he rescuing me? A Bond girl is an afterthought, a CliffsNote, perhaps. I asked, ‘Am I challenging Bond? Am I out to kill him? Will I kill him before he kills me?’ They hadn’t thought of that. I gave them other ideas, which were much more profound and interesting than what they were doing.”
Maud Adams instead went on to star as the title Bond character in the 1983 film.
“I just wanted to do really in-depth character pieces that weren’t predictable,” Grier recalled. “I turned down everything.”
The “Jackie Brown” star previously opened up about almost quitting Hollywood prior to “Foxy Brown” fame in 1974. “I wasn’t sure I was going to continue making films,” Grier said in a Fox News interview from November. “But it turned out I developed an audience. It wasn’t just women, but also artists and filmmakers who loved to see a woman walk in a man’s shoes and be viewed as strong, combative. Here was a woman who freely expressed herself in a way that wasn’t portrayed…I come from the Black West, from women who are wholesome, but fierce. I wanted to bring that into my work. I lassoed people in and it opened the floodgates.”
In 2022, Michelle Yeoh reflected on how her casting as a Bond girl in 1997’s “Tomorrow Never Dies” with Pierce Brosnan as 007 was revolutionary for the franchise.
“Bond was ready for change,” Yeoh said. “Bond had to evolve because the fan base was also evolving. Women were choosing the movies to go and watch, and we don’t always want to watch ones where we’re being sexualized.”
She added, “Looking like me, I don’t think sexualization was going to be a big problem!”
