Lashana Lynch is opening up about the “mean, dark” reaction to her “No Time to Die” casting.
The actress playing Nomi, who is rumoured to be taking over the 007 handle in the eagerly anticipated flick, tells the Guardian: “The response was generally positive, but there were some very personal messages to me, like Insta DMs and Twitter.
“And just conversations that my friends had heard or overheard on the [London subway] that were really mean, dark and reminiscent of an age I wasn’t even born in, where women and Black people weren’t allowed to move in certain spaces. So it also reminded me about the work that I still have to do to try to change the world in a little way that I know how.”
Lynch compared it to the racist abuse England players Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka suffered following their team’s Euros loss to Italy earlier this year.
“Well, I wasn’t surprised at the response from the football, which is really sad for me to have to say,” the star says. “If you are a Black person in entertainment or a Black person in sport, and you ‘fail,’ you are reminded that you cannot do both. You cannot be Black and entertain and fail. You have to be Black and entertain and win it for the country and win it for the world and win it for history.”
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She explains how she feels a responsibility “to young people, young girls and my community” to be the best she can be.
Lynch goes on, “To have a female agent who is a Black woman, and who is young and new and fresh and very modern in her approach to her work, I think hasn’t exactly been seen before in ‘Bond’ movies. And I didn’t want to mess it up.”
Despite the rumours, Lynch insists when questioned if she’s the next James Bond: “Nooo! You don’t want me!”
She tells the paper when asked who it should be: “We are in a place in time where the industry is not just giving audiences what it thinks the audience wants.
“They’re actually giving the audience what they want to give the audience. With Bond, it could be a man or woman. They could be white, Black, Asian, Mixed Race. They could be young or old. At the end of the day, even if a 2-year-old was playing Bond, everyone would flock to the cinema to see what this 2-year-old’s gonna do, no?”
