Black 007: If Idris Elba can pull off James Bond in style, who cares about his colour?

His name is Bond. James Bond. Not Black Bond. The only problem with Idris Elba being the next James Bond is he would promptly become the “Black Bond” and thus defeat the entire point of it all. Idris Elba’s Bond-worthiness has nothing to do with his race. Elba could be a splendid James Bond because he would look great in a suit, he can drink martinis with élan, fire futuristic weapons, bash up bad guys, romance beautiful leggy women and look unflappably cool at the same time. Jamie Foxx thinks the same, just a shade more colourfully:

I ran into Idris and I said ‘You know you’re the motherfuckin’ James Bond, right?"

All of this is buzzing in social media and on the We Want Idris Elba for James Bond Facebook group because of a leaked email from Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal. On 4 January, 2014 email to Elizabeth Cantillon, former executive vice president for production at Columbia, Pascal wrote “Idris should be the next bond.” [caption id=“attachment_2003647” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] Of course who knows how long Pascal will be around. This is the same Amy Pascal who is in the hot seat about her racially-tinged email banter on Obama’s taste in films. Since then she’s apologized and met with the Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Urban League and promised to work on diversity in Hollywood. How tragic it would be if James Bond became Exhibit A for a more diverse Hollywood. Even Elba would agree. Though he told a Reddit chat that if 007 was offered to him, he’d do it “absolutely” he has also said he hates the phrase “Black Bond”. “We don’t say ‘White Bond’, we just say Bond.” Elba as Bond might just be nothing more than Pascal’s fantasy. But coming on the heels of the white-washed Exodus: Gods and Kings it raises intriguing questions about colour-blind casting. Should those up in arms about the almost all-white Exodus be equally indignant about a “black Bond”? That sounds almost fair except it’s more complicated than that. Some characters are very much about race and ethnicity. A colour-blind The Colour Purple or Joy Luck Club makes no sense. An all-Caucasian Moses/Rameses spectacle does not reflect the historical reality of Egypt. When Jason Scott Lee played Mowgli in Jungle Book the implication was that just having someone brown was good enough and not the bare necessity. The big blindspot with colour-blindness is it has typically worked as a one-way street. It has meant that white actors can don yellow face or brown face or black face but actors of colour remain consigned to bit roles. After a controversy over the casting of The Orphan of Zhao, a play described as a “Chinese Hamlet,” Gabby Wong writes that the Royal Shakespeare Company basically thinks it’s OK “to have a white actor playing a leading Chinese character but a Chinese actor can play a white character only if it’s minor and hidden away.” But renowned African American playwright August Wilson says he does not even want to see an all-black Death of a Salesman because he sees it as a work “conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture” and just putting it on with a black cast actually ignores African Americans’ “need to make our (their) investigation from the cultural ground on which (they) stand as black Americans.” Where does James Bond fit into all of this? Nowhere actually even though all of these arguments will come up if Elba becomes Bond after Spectre releases in 2015. Casting Elba actually forces us to confront the idea that Bond is quintessentially British which should not mean quintessentially white. The fact that Bond has always been white is because in Ian Fleming’s world view that was the de facto choice. His character has long moved out of Ian Fleming’s particular time frame and there is no reason why a Bond in contemporary Britain cannot credibly be of African or Caribbean or Indian-Pakistani heritage and still be British any more than M, the head of MI6 cannot be a woman. James Bond has been played by different actors who do not resemble each other in the slightest and there’s never been an attempt to explain the casting change. Audiences have accepted the transition without fuss even if they argue bitterly about who was the most killer Bond of them all. Bond has never needed to get into an accident and undergone plastic surgery in order to come back as Daniel Craig after being Pierce Brosnan. Daniel Craig could change to Idris Elba with equal nonchalance. In fact, the scriptwriters should not even bother to concoct a back story just because there’s been a colour change. Unlike Superman, the point of Bond has never been the back story. It’s only recently in Skyfall that we saw the graves of his parents and that was film No. 23 in the series. Ian Fleming waited till his second-to-last book to get into Bond’s family background. Bond is really about guns, gadgets and girls. And style. And as long as an Idris Elba can pull that off, the franchise remains not shaken, merely stirred.