4 Bond Blondes

Daniel Craig was vilified before he’d even stepped foot on the set of Casino Royale, with much of the opprobrium targeted at his distinctly un-Bondian, unmasculine blonde hair. Some said they couldn’t see him as the hero, but they would buy him as the villain. Here are four blonde Bond villains who helped to create the cinematic stereotype of blonde men as Other.

Giving a character blonde hair has been a way of coding a character as queer from at least as far back as the Victorian era: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for instance, with its gay-coded anti-hero striving to maintain his youthful looks (including his full head of blonde hair), whatever the cost.

Whereas blonde women are stereotyped as beautiful but airheaded, male blondes are typically seen as unmasculine and - another stereotype! - gay. It’s difficult to pin down a reliable figure for what percentage of the world’s population is naturally blonde, but it’s likely to be substantially less than the proportion of human beings who are predominantly attracted to the same sex. There are more gay people than blonde people in the world. As some who is blonde-haired* AND gay, I’ve grown used to the feeling of being in a double minority!

*strawberry blonde/ginger (depending on how long I’ve been in the sun and my hair is a lot less red than when I was a child… unfortunately)

Storytellers tap into fear of Otherness when crafting a villainous character.

Making a male villain blonde has proved to be a useful shortcut throughout cinema history and the Bond series has done more than most to make us feel deeply suspect towards any man with locks of a lighter hue. Here are four of them:

Red Grant in From Russia With Love

In the world of 007, male blondeness often connotes femininity or he-doth-protest-too-much hypermasculinity. Terence Young stipulated that Grant’s blondeness was essential to the character and stuck to his guns, even when Robert Shaw almost walked away from the role, citing his reluctance to dye his hair. Grant’s blondeness might appear to make Grant the antithesis of the dark-haired Bond but, in other ways, the character are unnervingly the same. In the book, the similarities between the characters are made even more abundantly clear by Fleming repeatedly describing his facial features as “cruel”, the same adjective he uses for Bond’s appearance.

Hans in You Only Live Twice

If You Only Live Twice was a video game Hans would be boss you have to defeat to get the key to get to the thingummy which will save the day. He’s a muscle queen without much of a brain in other words, except he has absolutely no words to say. The most interesting thing about him is he is blonde. Other than that he’s just a beefcake in a tight sweatshirt, which is all very nice and good if you have time for that sort of thing but Hans baby, I’m trying to avert World War III - get out of my way!

Erich Kriegler in For Your Eyes Only

The biathlon champion cum KGB operative Erich Kriegler flaunts his hairless, oiled, muscular physique (if you’ve got it, why not?). According to Bibi Dahl (who finds him “dreamy”) Kriegler lives an ascetic lifestyle, akin to the departed monks of St Cyril’s. Apparently, “he won’t even talk to girls”. He’s a less taciturn Hans from You Only Live Twice, although Krieglier is not exactly verbose. He’s not a million miles away from Necros in The Living Daylights, although he doesn’t share his predilection for disguises. He DOES however share Necros’ preference for skimpy bathing trunks.

For Your Eyes Only features two additional blonde baddies: Claus and Emilio Leopold Locque.

Stamper in Tomorrow Never Dies

At the risk of sounding catty, Stamper is not a natural blonde. His hair is bleached, something stereotypically associated with gay men. In 2019, Out magazine declared that ‘The heteros have discovered platinum blonde’, suggesting that this was now within the domain of the metrosexual (to use the term coined by gay male academic Mark Simpson in 1994). One of Stamper’s eyes is blue and one is brown. It is another way of Othering the character. The technical name for this naturally occurring phenomenon is ‘heterochromia’. It’s the only hetero thing about Stamper. Tellingly, when Carver goads Bond by announcing to his whole stealth ship that Bond “can’t resist any woman in my possession” there’s a cut away to a reaction shot of Stamper, who is shown to be sneering at Bond’s rather pedestrian weakness for women.

Who are your favourite blonde Bond characters? Add your comments below or join the conversation on social media.

Some of the material for this piece was adapted from the relevant sections of the queer re-views of each of the four films, which you can read in full from here: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/find-a-queer-film-re-view

Photographs from https://www.thunderballs.org/