Italian actor Monica Bellucci suspected she was being invited to replace Judi Dench as M in the new James Bond film, Spectre, rather than asked to play the oldest Bond girl so far.
Bellucci told the Sunday Times she met director Sam Mendes to discuss the part and told him: “I’m not a girl, I’m a woman, I’m a mature woman. Do I have to replace Judi Dench?”
“Why do you call me?” she asked him. “I’m 50 years old – what am I going to do in James Bond?’”
According to Bellucci, Mendes laughed and said: “For the first time in history, James Bond is going to have a story with a mature woman. The concept is revolutionary.”
The actor says she then told the Oscar-winning film-maker he would be a “hero among women” for delivering a Bond who becomes attracted to someone his own age. Bellucci is just four years older than current Bond, Daniel Craig, 46, but a full 11 years older than the previous oldest “Bond girl”: Honor Blackman was 39 when she played Pussy Galore opposite a 34-year-old Sean Connery in 1964’s Goldfinger.
Dench, 80, played secret service chief M in seven Bond movies between 1995’s Goldeneye and 2012’s Skyfall.
In an interview with the Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine, Bellucci, who will play Lucia Sciarra in Spectre, suggested age should be largely irrelevant in romance.
“Many 50-year-old women feel invisible to men, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” she said. “What is the problem with a man of 30 being with a woman of 50? It is a matter of energy and the soul, not a matter of age of the body.
Bellucci added: “True sexiness is in the mind, the imagination – not in the age of the body. It doesn’t surprise me that men in their 20s and 30s are often looking for a much older woman.”
She pointed to actors such as Isabelle Huppert and Charlotte Rampling as examples of women who have inspired her. “Men look at Judi Dench and they see so much strength, so much power that comes from inside. And that’s attractive. I look at those women and hope that I can have that interior richness as I get older, the kind you cannot see through the eyes.”
Bellucci and Craig will co-star with double Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz and French actor Léa Seydoux in Spectre, which is currently shooting in London, Rome and the Austrian Alps. The film is expected to hit UK cinemas on 23 October and debut in the US on 6 November.
