Idris Elba doesn’t want the the burden of a failed Bond movie on his shoulders

The 'Luther' actor says race could play a part in him being blamed for any future failed Bond flick

Jun 28, 2019

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Idris Elba says he doesn’t want to be held responsible for a failed James Bond movie if he were cast as the British spy.

Elba once again shut down rumors that he plans to play Bond in a recent Vanity Fair interview although he said he would accept the offer if asked.

“Of course, if someone said to me ‘Do you want to play James Bond?,’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah! That’s fascinating to me,'” Elba said in the interview.

“But it’s not something I’ve expressed, like, Yeah, I wanna be the black James Bond.”

However, he does caution that if he did play Bond, its success or failure could be ascribed to his skin color and that’s not something he wants attributed to him.

“And it really turns out to be the color of my skin and then if I get it and it didn’t work, or it did work, would it be because of the color of my skin?

“That’s a difficult position to put myself into when I don’t need to,” the actor said.

He also admitted that he’s dismayed that people doubt his abilities to tackle the role.

“You just get disheartened when you get people from a generational point of view going, ‘It can’t be,'” Elba said.

Elba has had to swat rumors for the past year about the possibility that he would be cast as Bond.

The Internet however ceremoniously cast Elba as the unofficial “Black” James Bond, but last year the British actor had a better idea of who should play the spy legend: a Black woman.

When asked about the possibility of him stepping into the role of 007, Elba distanced himself from the project. Instead, he said, the franchise should go in an entirely new direction.

“Are we interested in having a Bond character other than being a male?” he told Variety. “Could be a woman, could be a Black woman, could be a white woman, but I think, that character, everybody would like to see it have — do something different with it, why not?”

But it’s all still highly speculative. For now, Daniel Craig will reprise his role as the suave secret agent in the 25th installation of the Bond series, due out in 2020.