The announcement of the next actor to play superspy James Bond could be made by the close of the year. But according to Dr Stephen M. Whitehead, as AI takes over more technical tasks, emotional intelligence and experience should define the next 007. His choice: a woman in her 40s

In October, Variety reported that final screen tests for the new James Bond were imminent, with Callum Turner and Jack Lowden among the possible contenders. Since then, it has been reported that Robert Pattinson has also auditioned for the role. 

Amazon MGM now has creative control of the franchise, which it co-owns with Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. While the studio has yet to announce its new 007 for the next Bond film, which will be directed by Denis Villeneuve with Steven Knight writing, producer Amy Pascal has suggested that casting news by the end of 2026 is ‘a good bet’.

Yet the machine appears to be turning in a familiar direction: another handsome man in a dinner jacket. Another man who can run fast, fight dirty and say very little. I think this is a commercial and cultural mistake. If James Bond is to survive the next few decades, the next Bond needs to be a woman, and ideally she should be about 40.

Ian Fleming introduced Bond in Casino Royale in 1953, building him from the materials to hand: a war-hardened, emotionally sealed, sexually acquisitive Englishman whose job was to absorb pain and dish out violence on behalf of a fading empire. Bond was traditional masculinity with a licence. Stoicism and aggression were not his flaws but his job description.

For more than 70 years the franchise has tweaked the surface while leaving that core intact. Daniel Craig gave us a Bond who bled and grieved, and that was a genuine advance. But even Craig’s Bond was a man who processed his feelings by hitting things. The emotional register was richer, but the toolkit was the same.

Over the past half-century we have lived through what I call the ‘gender revolution’, the most profound reordering of relations between women and men in human history. Women across much of the world have moved into education, professions, public life and economic independence on a scale our grandparents could not have imagined. In my research I have described the result as ‘independent femininity’: a generation of women who no longer need a man for money, status or identity, and who increasingly choose how and whether they partner at all.

Men, by and large, have not kept pace. This is not because men are incapable of change. Much of the explanation lies in what I call the ‘gender conveyor belt’, the long process of upbringing, schooling and culture that turns babies into gendered adults. Girls are often encouraged to read faces, notice moods, manage relationships and listen. Boys are still frequently instructed in stoicism and aggression – don’t cry, stand your ground and win.

One symptom of the distance between women and men is what I call the ‘semantic gap’. Women and men often use the same words – respect, strength, commitment, even love – and mean quite different things by them. A woman says she wants a strong man and means someone emotionally secure enough to listen. A man hears ‘strong’ and squares his shoulders. James Bond sits squarely on the wrong side of that gap. He is strength as men were taught to understand it.

A different Bond could embody a different understanding of strength, and the rise of artificial intelligence gives us another reason to reconsider that toolkit. Machines already handle calculation and information processing on a scale no human agent could manage. I expect the next decade to bring further advances in driving, surveillance, code-breaking and weapons systems, absorbing more of the technical skills Bond relies on and the gadgets Q hands him.

So what is left for the human spy? The answer is the oldest intelligence of all: the ability to understand people better than they understand themselves. To sit across a table from someone and know, before they do, that they are frightened, or lonely, or about to betray you. To read the flicker of shame, the over-rehearsed alibi, the need for approval that can be gently exploited. To build trust, and to know when trust is being faked.

AI can certainly mimic empathy. I’ve spent the last few years researching AI companionship, and I can tell you the mimicry is now very convincing. But convincing emotional language does not establish that a machine knows what it is like to be afraid, to be loved or to lose someone.

In the age of AI, then, the spy who matters is the one who understands human beings most deeply. The gender conveyor belt makes a woman particularly well suited to that role.

And why around 40? Consider what maturity brings. A woman of that age may have built a career, negotiated difficult relationships or learned to use being underestimated to her advantage. She has seen through men who thought they were seeing through her. The camera should be interested in her mind.

That is exactly the agent the future requires. A middle-aged woman whose power lies in perception, judgement and emotional depth is a hero that men can learn from, women can recognise themselves in, and young people of any gender can look up to. Such a Bond could broaden the franchise’s appeal beyond another man in a well-cut suit.

Daniel Craig argued that women should have roles just as good as Bond, rather than take over the character. I understand the sentiment but I think he was wrong. Creating a separate female spy franchise leaves Bond himself untouched, a monument to a masculinity that is quietly passing into history. The point is not to give women their own toy but, instead, to let the most famous hero in British cinema grow up.

Because let’s admit it: careering around cities in a tuxedo, bedding strangers and shooting first was thrilling in 1962 but it’s passé now. If Amazon wants a Bond for the next 30 years rather than the last 70, it should heed my advice – a secret agent who gives others the licence to spill.

Dr Stephen M. Whitehead is a British gender sociologist and the author of more than 20 books, published by Routledge, Polity, Oxford University Press and Random House. A foundational figure in masculinity studies with over 35 years of research, he co-developed the concept of toxic masculinity and originated the frameworks of Total Inclusivity and healthy self-love. He was Senior Lecturer at Keele University from 1997 to 2015. He currently leads the Global AI Intimacy Study, an international investigation into how AI is reshaping human relationships, with fieldwork across Latin America and India. His next book, Where Have All the Good Men Gone? The Reordering of Intimacy, co-authored with Constanza Fernández Arce, will be published in 2027. He is The European’s Leadership and Organisational Culture Correspondent and lives in Thailand.

READ MORE: The coach driver building a dating platform in his sixties. At 61, coach driver Kevin Peddie is building a new dating platform, LoveHuddle, from his home in South Wales with little money and no tech background. He speaks to Dr Stephen M. Whitehead about how enterprise can offer purpose in later life.

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