Who should have played Christmas Jones?
Number24
NorwayPosts: 22,334MI6 Agent
I just saw the second part of JBR's review of TWINE. It's very nice to see Chris back on JBR. Like many others they felt Denise Richards was miscast as Dr Christmas Jones. I certainly agree. Like they said, Richards would be better cast in Baywatch.
So who should have been cast in the role? Jennifer Connelly has been mentioned in the past. She's stunningly beautiful, an award, winning actress and obviously very intelligent. The last part is important because Jones is a nuclear physicist. But Connelly was moving away from parts that mainly traded on her looks at that time, so I doubt she would have accepted.
Jennifer Connelly in 1997
I think the Indian actress Aishwarya Rai would have been a better choice. She's a former Miss World and I've never seen a photo of her where she doesn't look stunning. Aishwarya considered becoming a doctor of medicine before she hit it big as a model and actress, so she is smart. he was a superstar in the Bollywood market, but for the rest of the world she would have been a excotic and fresh face. It even makes sense politically. Even in the 1990's I doubt the Russians would have let and American into their nuclear facilities, but India had ties with the USSR.
Do you have opinions on the matter? Posts with illustrations are the most informative.
So who should have been cast in the role? Jennifer Connelly has been mentioned in the past. She's stunningly beautiful, an award, winning actress and obviously very intelligent. The last part is important because Jones is a nuclear physicist. But Connelly was moving away from parts that mainly traded on her looks at that time, so I doubt she would have accepted.
Jennifer Connelly in 1997
I think the Indian actress Aishwarya Rai would have been a better choice. She's a former Miss World and I've never seen a photo of her where she doesn't look stunning. Aishwarya considered becoming a doctor of medicine before she hit it big as a model and actress, so she is smart. he was a superstar in the Bollywood market, but for the rest of the world she would have been a excotic and fresh face. It even makes sense politically. Even in the 1990's I doubt the Russians would have let and American into their nuclear facilities, but India had ties with the USSR.
Do you have opinions on the matter? Posts with illustrations are the most informative.
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Do you think Richards was convincing as a doctor of nuclear physics?
Of course the went for looks rather than believability...
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My change was to replace Denise Richards with Catherine Zeta Jones.
In 1998 she had made a vivid impression in the Mask of Zorro, and in late 1999 she was in Entrapment opposite Sean Connory.
Trouble is she was scripted as a nuclear physicist, and while I'm sure there's many sexy nuclear physicists in the real world this actress did not convince me at all of the nuclear physicist part.
Going back to the end of the Moore era, Tanya Roberts played a sexy geologist, but I did indeed believe she was a geologist.
I think Richards lacked the acting chops to sell her character.
I believe Teri Hatcher was pregnant during filming.
Well...on the critical casting decision of Christmas Jones, it’s not as if TWINE was a cornerstone entry in the series. There was also something off with the casting of Robert Carlyle, as the 2nd Brit in the movie hamming a foreign accent; the presence of John Cleese inadvertently clinched giving it all a vibe of Monty Python, lol. Come to think of it, reducing the film’s main characters down to just Bond and Elektra would have worked IMO, since she was the villain and romantic interest rolled up into one; in fact, Bond had a stronger emotional and sexual connection with her than Christmas Jones, an indicator that the it was the script that had serious problems.
I agree with so much of this. I do think Carlyle gave a decent performance aside from the accent, however. He wasn't one note like the majority of Bond villains seem to be. He comes across as a man who very much doesn't want to die but has resigned himself to the reality of it.
The Elektra tragedy would have been that much more impressive without the superfluous good girl character showing up for the final scenes.
(Charlie Sheen, no way!! hawhawhaw, poor Denise),
...and would like to seriously think of other actresses from the era that would have played the part more persuasively.
Trying to remember some of my favourite actresses circa 1999:
Cameron Diaz, Heather Graham, or Gwyneth Paltrow all would have made a better Bond girl, but are all a bit silly. In the same film as John Cleese, all sense of tragedy woulda been lost.
Julianne Moore was doing lots of great work in those days, and could easily persuade me she's a nuclear physicist. But she's only 5'3". So what do we want in a Bondgirl, tall or smart?
Cate Blanchett I think I had only seen so far in Elizabeth, where she was plenty crafty, and had yet to play Galadriel, so was not so wellknown, and she's 5'9"! in fact, maybe she'd be too good, we'd care even less about Elektra if Cate Blanchett was lead Bond girl.
A good point I didn't think of myself. The script could have worked fine without Christmas Jones.
I think the best Bond girls are often actesseswho are stunning and have very good career in their native market, but are mostly unknown internationally. An actress who could have been Perfect to play Christmas Jones is the Norwegian/Swedish Maria Bonnevie. In 1999 she was 26 years old and was in her only Hollywood film in her career, the regrettable Antonio Banderas film "The 13th Warrior". TWINE would probably been much better for her international career. At that time she was Ingar Bergman's favourite theatre actress, a film star in her two native countries and she looked like this:
She would have been 35 at the time and here's how she looked in "Malena" (2000):
Having seen TWINE again, I feel strongly that the casting should have been exactly what it was, with Denise Richards playing Christmas Jones. Ms Richards looks sexy in classic 'Playboy' Bond girl style, she's feisty when bantering with Bond (spunky enough to convince as more than just a pretty face), and sufficiently athletic for all the gruelling physical work on the submarine set (having to hold her own on a slippery hydraulic rig, being drenched in torrents of water and submerged in a tank. Not all otherwise suitable actresses could have weathered that kind of punishment.) Denise Richards' character is the least well written and developed of the leads, but she coexists with and doesn't get in the way of Sophie Marceau's outstanding thespian performance at the dramatic centre of the film. Ms Marceau gets to do it all, from vulnerable victim to villainous vamp, from industrialist power broker to sexual romantic (even channelling Diana Rigg of OHMSS, for the ski scene), from tragic heroine with an Electra complex to unhinged torturer and would-be mass murderer. Denise Richards adds a contrasting, more consistent texture to the movie and keeps up a breezily conventional, 'wet tee-shirt' love interest, reaching through the action beyond Elektra's death. Some of the contemporary fall-out over Christmas as a character stemmed from the cheesey double-entendres for which her name seemed specifically purposed (Bond: "I thought Christmas comes only once a year!"): the Christmas jokes perhaps aligned her too closely in the minds of 90s audiences with ditzier sex kittens from Bond's past, such as Mary Goodnight (M on the phone: "Goodnight? Goodnight?" Bond: "She's just coming, sir... Goodnight, sir!")
When evaluating the first three Brosnan Bonds and their antecedents in the franchise, I tend to see GE as connecting back with Terence Young's dark edginess, TND with Lewis Gilbert's spectacular exuberance, and TWINE with the character-rich intrigue of John Glen's Bonds. Above all, Christmas Jones seems to me to channel geologist Stacey Sutton from Glen's AVTAK, a sexy young American with brains as well as beauty, possessing expertise relevant to the plot but essentially lightweight. Denise Richards ramps up and injects attitude into the same sort of appeal which Tanya Roberts brought to Stacey; yet Ms Richards occupies a role perhaps appropriately more limited by the richer configuration of other lead characters in TWINE (Elektra, Bond, Renard and M).
Especially in Die Another Day, I'm sure it's just the casting and the direction of it but like, I dunno, it's the same feel I get here.
It feels slimy with both Elektra and Jones that this Bond ends up banging them. That's my hot take on this.
She's fine for the setting but what ends up being the use of her in the story is entirely a script problem, same as her not feeling believable.
But eh. The movie's ruined in rewatches for me because of the prior problem.
Shrug.
The 'Dirty Old Man' latent in Pierce Brosnan's Bond of TWINE and DAD sometimes comes to the fore and I agree that this can get off-putting. The scene in Zukovsky's casino where Brosnan's eyeing up the talent with his X-Ray Specs and suppressing his 'phwoar' reactions would barely be out of place in a 'Carry On' movie. The same is true of his quip, "First things first!" when Christmas explains that "someone's gonna have my ass" if she doesn't get back the weapons grade plutonium. I'd add to the comparison I and others in this thread have already made between Christmas and Stacey Sutton by arguing that such 'Dirty Old Man' lasciviousness on Brosnan's part calls back to Roger Moore's Bond leering at Tanya Roberts some fifteen years previously, the age gap feeling even more uncomfortable in Moore's case: we get a similar changing in and out of overalls on an industrial site, and another puerile "ass" joke. (Stacey: "Do you know what I'm sitting on?" Bond: "I'm trying not to think about it!" [Stacey is hiding with Bond in a rail car full of explosives, her borrowed overalls too tight for her figure.]) Since this seems to have been the lineage invoked for Christmas Jones, Denise Richards is well cast.
True, but even then I'd say Moore handled it with more class and almost sold it because he was Roger Moore.
Just my opinion though
so how does DAD fit in? it heavy handedly pays tribute to every single one of the previous 19 movies, but also seems to announce a brash new attitude
So, in a nutshell, DAD was supposedly the series’ torchbearer into the new century, a wholly new and different animal altogether...which to me was more emblematic with Gustav Graves than it was with Bond.