The ‘Lady Bird’ actress previously said she was “dead serious” about playing a 007 character but admits she may have spoken too soon

NEED TO KNOW

• Saoirse Ronan has expressed interest in playing a young female Bond villain with a dramatic, dark edge
• Her husband, Jack Lowden, is among the actors rumored to be in the running for the next James Bond
• Denis Villeneuve is set to direct the next 007 film, with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight writing the script

Saoirse Ronan may have talked herself out of becoming the next Bond villain.

The 32-year-old actress has previously been open about her desire to enter the world of 007 — preferably on the darker side of the franchise. But with her husband, Jack Lowden, among the actors whose names have been linked to the role of James Bond, the Lady Bird star admits her villain pitch may have come back to haunt her.

“I’ve eaten my words after saying that now,” Ronan tells PEOPLE when asked about her past comments and her husband’s reported connection to the role.

Ronan first made her Bond ambitions clear in 2024, when she said she would be interested in playing a female villain who has more on her mind than winning Bond’s affection. More recently, she doubled down on the idea, telling Empire that she was “dead serious” about wanting to play the bad guy.

“I want to go dark,” Ronan said in the Aug. 24 feature. “I said that I wanted to be a Bond villain and I’m dead serious.”

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And Ronan already has a pretty good idea of the kind of 007 villain she’d like to play.

“I think it would be really interesting, having a young female villain,” she told Empire. “Especially for girls and women, to see someone who can just take all that pent-up anger and direct it somewhere, there’s something interesting about that dramatically. So I would love to do more of that.”

The Bond franchise has had its share of memorable female villains and antagonists, including Grace Jones‘ May Day in A View to a Kill, Famke Janssen‘s Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye and Sophie Marceau‘s Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough.

Amazon MGM Studios is currently developing the next James Bond movie, with Denis Villeneuve set to direct and Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight writing the script.

The studio has not announced casting for Bond or the film’s villain, but Lowden, 36, has been among the names linked to the coveted 007 role.

Other actors reportedly in the mix include Eternity‘s Callum Turner, Saltburn‘s Jacob Elordi, Spider-Man star Tom Holland, Bullet Train‘s Aaron Taylor-Johnson and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes‘ Harris Dickinson, who is set to play John Lennon in the upcoming Beatles biopics.

Over the years, the Bond franchise has featured a long list of actors in the title role and an equally memorable roster of villains. Previous 007s have included Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, while villains have ranged from iconic figures like Goldfinger and Blofeld to more recent adversaries played by Javier Bardem, Christoph Waltz and Rami Malek.

Lowden is best known for playing River Cartwright in the spy series Slow Horses, but his reported connection to Bond has added an especially fun wrinkle to Ronan’s own desire to join the franchise.

Ronan isn’t saying whether her husband has actually landed the role — and she declined to discuss casting when asked about the reports — but she is enthusiastic about the idea of working with him again.

“We met through work and we’ve produced stuff together, and we’re very much a part of one another’s work life as well as personal life,” she says. “So it just feels like when the right thing comes along, it would be the obvious choice for us to do it together.”

The next James Bond film currently has a theatrical release planned for 2028. Ronan’s dark comedy Bad Apples hits theaters in the U.S. and U.K. on Sept. 18, 2026.

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