The arguments against Idris Elba playing James Bond are bullshit
James Bond endures in part because he is both modern (liberal in his tastes; fully embracing a world of casual, consensual sex; well traveled and well versed in the consumer products of the age) and conservative (defending the nostalgia of a once-great nation state/empire; unambiguously defining certain individuals, usually foreigners, as evil and going out to destroy them; and loyal). If you read the books, plenty of Fleming’s own racism and misogyny and homophobia bleed into the character.
His contradictions, his malleability, are part of his appeal. And Elba as Bond would certainly allow new dimensions of the character’s essential identity to be explored—or erased. How far can we stretch this implausible character while maintaining his essence? What is his essence? We can probably imagine a gay actor playing a straight Bond. A gay Bond?
Because, for all the specific attributes we associate with Bond, literary or cinematic—the patriotism, the misogyny, the courage under fire, the gadgets, the ennui, the lust for danger—there is that sense that when we go looking for the root of Bond, we often find nothing there at all. Fleming once noted that he meant for Bond to be“an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened.” That may be what makes him endure as a character most of all, the essential void at his center. He is a cipher, a blank space, with perhaps only a mirror with which to find some image of ourselves.