Saoirse Ronan Is “Dead Serious” About Playing a Bond Villain. The Timing Is Better Than Ever

Saoirse Ronan wants to be a Bond villain.

Not a Bond girl. Not somebody who gets pulled into 007’s orbit, falls for him and eventually switches sides. Ronan wants to be the problem.

While promoting her upcoming dark comedy Bad Apples, the four-time Academy Award nominee brought up an idea she has been pushing for years. Speaking with Empire, Ronan said she wants to “go dark” and that she is “dead serious” about playing a Bond villain. More specifically, she has talked about wanting to play a younger female antagonist with motivations of her own, rather than another character whose relationship with Bond becomes the center of the story.

Celebrity casting pitches are nothing unusual. Actors regularly volunteer themselves for superheroes, sequels and franchises they would like to join.

Ronan’s pitch is more interesting because she hasn’t suddenly jumped onto the Bond bandwagon. She was publicly talking about this in 2024, before the franchise went through one of the biggest changes in its history.

The interesting part isn’t just that Saoirse Ronan wants Bond.

It’s that Bond changed while she kept asking.

The Bond franchise she originally pitched has changed

When Ronan was discussing the role in 2024, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson still held creative control over the film series their family had guided for decades.

That changed in 2025.

Amazon MGM Studios, Broccoli and Wilson formed a joint venture housing the James Bond intellectual property. The transaction closed on March 24, 2025, leaving all three parties as co-owners while giving Amazon MGM Studios creative control over future Bond productions.

Since then, Amazon MGM has been building the creative team for the first Bond movie since No Time to Die ended Daniel Craig’s run in 2021.

Dune and Arrival filmmaker Denis Villeneuve is directing. Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight is writing the screenplay. Amy Pascal, whose producing credits include the Spider-Man films, and longtime Harry Potter producer David Heyman are producing, with Tanya Lapointe serving as executive producer.

There is still one fairly important vacancy.

James Bond.

Amazon MGM publicly confirmed on May 14 that the search for the next 007 is underway and said the casting process had only recently begun. The following day, Variety reported that actors were already auditioning and that veteran casting director Nina Gold had been enlisted to help find Daniel Craig’s successor.

The studio’s current public updates have not announced a title, plot or villain for the movie.

And there is an important distinction to make here: there is no credible report that Ronan has been approached, auditioned or placed on a shortlist to play the villain.

She wants the part.

Whether anyone involved with the movie wants to give it to her is another question entirely.

This would hardly be stunt casting

Ronan does not need James Bond to establish her credentials.

She earned her first Academy Award nomination for Atonement when she was just 13 years old. By 25, nominations for Brooklyn, Lady Bird and Little Women had made her a four-time acting nominee. According to the Academy, Ronan became the second-youngest performer in Oscar history to reach four acting nominations, behind only Jennifer Lawrence.

That resume actually makes the villain idea more interesting.

Ronan has spent much of her career playing people audiences are asked to understand, sympathize with or at least stay emotionally connected to. Brooklyn, Lady Bird and Little Women all depend heavily on her ability to make complicated characters feel human.

Put that talent on the other side of James Bond and things could get interesting very quickly.

And for anyone wondering whether Ronan belongs in an action movie, there is a 2011 answer called Hanna.

Joe Wright’s thriller cast Ronan as a teenage girl raised by her ex-CIA father and trained to become an assassin. Focus Features’ production history says stunt coordinator Jeff Imada trained Ronan for six weeks, sometimes five or six hours a day, incorporating martial arts, boxing, grappling, conditioning and weapons work. Ronan also performed a number of her own stunts.

She was a teenager at the time.

So no, casting Saoirse Ronan in Bond would not be an experiment to see whether a prestige actor could survive an action movie.

She’s already done that.

She’s already heading somewhere darker

Ronan’s current movie makes the timing of the Bond conversation even more fun.

In Bad Apples, she plays Maria, a primary school teacher overwhelmed by one disruptive student. A series of increasingly terrible decisions eventually leaves the child locked inside Maria’s home. When the classroom begins functioning better without the student, the situation gets considerably more uncomfortable. HanWay Films describes the movie as a satirical comedy with a thriller edge.

Ronan herself has pushed back against the idea that Maria is simply a psychopath, describing the character instead as an unusually nice kind of villain. Bad Apples is scheduled to open in the U.S. and U.K. on September 18.

Obviously, playing a desperate schoolteacher who makes a horrifying decision is not the same thing as plotting against James Bond.

But Ronan’s interest in darker characters clearly isn’t limited to something she said during an interview.

She’s already playing with it.

Ronan’s version of a Bond villain could be the interesting part

Ronan has also been surprisingly specific about what she doesn’t want from the role.

When she discussed Bond with Vanity Fair in 2024, she talked about wanting a female villain who genuinely wants to defeat Bond, not simply someone written around the possibility of falling in love with him. Her new comments make the same basic point: she is interested in a woman with her own agenda.

That’s a better pitch than simply asking to wear an expensive dress and point a gun at 007.

Bond has certainly had dangerous women before, and Ronan would not be breaking completely untouched ground. But the franchise has historically reserved its biggest world-threatening masterminds for men far more often than women.

More importantly, we don’t know yet what kind of Bond movie Villeneuve and Knight are making.

That’s where we have to stop reporting and start analyzing.

Villeneuve has made a career out of movies where danger is rarely interesting because somebody is simply evil. Prisoners, Sicario, Blade Runner 2049 and the Dune films are full of characters driven by power, ideology, desperation and conflicting ideas about what needs to happen next.

Knight has spent plenty of time in similarly messy territory with Peaky Blinders.

None of that proves what their Bond villain will look like. It doesn’t tell us whether the villain will be male or female, young or old, grounded or outrageous.

It does make Ronan’s idea easy to imagine.

A Bond antagonist played by one of the best dramatic actors of her generation would not need another volcano lair or facial scar to be threatening. Give Ronan a character smart enough to believe she is right, give Bond a reason to underestimate her, and let the two of them tear into each other for two hours.

I’d watch that.

So, is Saoirse Ronan actually the next Bond villain?

Right now?

No one outside the production can responsibly say that.

Amazon MGM has not announced a villain. There is no established report that Ronan is negotiating for the role, meeting with Villeneuve or being considered by the studio.

That’s worth saying because the internet has a remarkable ability to turn “an actor would love this role” into “casting reportedly underway” before lunch.

This isn’t that story.

This is an actor with four Oscar nominations who has been openly asking to play a Bond villain since at least 2024. Since she first made that pitch, Amazon MGM has taken creative control of the franchise, Denis Villeneuve has signed on to direct, Steven Knight has begun writing, new producers have taken over the film, and the search for a new James Bond has officially started.

Ronan still wants in.

Maybe nobody involved is listening.

But if they are, she has made a much better case for herself than most actors who publicly ask for a franchise job.

And considering the next Bond movie is already being rebuilt from scratch, letting Saoirse Ronan finally be terrible might not be a bad place to start.