Lashana Lynch knew from the second she signed on to play Nomi in No Time to Die that she would be facing vitriolic and very troubling backlash, for the sole reason that she was a black woman playing 007. Certain subsets were up in arms at the news and fired awful abuse in her direction, but the actress took it all in her stride.
The dissenters should have really waited to see the movie for themselves, because Lynch is great in the film. A more than capable agent, her back-and-forth banter with Daniel Craig’s James Bond is a recurring highlight, especially when the duo are constantly engaged in figurative d*ck-measuring over who makes the better 007.
In a new interview with IndieWire, Lynch explained how she built her character from the ground up, making sure to credit Fleabag creator and No Time to Die co-writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge as another major source of inspiration when it came to crafting the franchise’s latest MI6 operative.
“The last meeting that I had with Barbara Broccoli, Cary Fukunaga, and Daniel Craig was one of many questions. Because, in the last two meetings, I had read sides from other Bond films, and I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I didn’t know who she was going to be, what her name was, what she was representing, I didn’t know anything. I just knew I was auditioning for a Bond movie. Why does she have to be a match for Bond? Great, female writer, tick, the writer of Fleabag, sure. I’m sold. Don’t worry about it. I’m in.
I was like, ‘This is where I want her to be, and she’s got so much potential and I think she should be kind of awkward, but really realistic, and I want young people to be relating to her in the way that I haven’t had the opportunity to do before, and what do you think?’. And she just said, ‘Yep, yep. That’s where I’m at too. I agree. I think we should write that. I think she should be all of those things and more’. And I thought, ‘Wow, thank you. Thank you for hearing me finally, thank you for being a woman writer who is in the position to hear me fully’.”
No Time to Die has been enjoying enthusiastic reviews and bumper box office takings so far, and while it marks the end of the line for Craig’s tenure as Bond, Lynch has already admitted that she’d be more than open to the idea of seeing Nomi return in a future installment.