Halle Berry suggests James Bond shouldn’t be a woman, doubts Jinx spinoff: ‘Time has passed’

James Bond star and Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry doesn’t know if a future 007 “should be a woman,” the celebrated actress said this week at a Cannes Film Festival press conference.

Ahead of serving on the prestigious cinema competition’s jury, the actress told reporters at the start of the festival that she’s unsure that the gender of the beloved British Secret Service character should be swapped in future installments, after she costarred alongside Pierce Brosnan as NSA agent Jinx in the 2002 Bond blockbuster Die Another Day.

“I don’t know if 007 really should be a woman. In 2025, it’s nice to say, ‘Oh, she should be a woman.’ But, I don’t really know if I think that’s the right thing to do,” the 58-year-old said, per video from Cannes.

She later addressed a long-running rumor that she’ll reprise the role of Jinx in a spinoff film at some point in the future, after there were prior attempts to make a standalone project centered around the character.

“And, no, I doubt there will be a Jinx spinoff,” Berry added. “There was a time that that could’ve happened — probably should’ve happened, I would’ve loved for that to happen — but I think that time has passed.”

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a representative for Berry for additional comment.

Berry appeared in Die Another Day as the first project to be released following her history-making Oscar-winning turn in 2001’s Monster’s Ball. The film went on to gross over $432 million at the global box office and spawned talks of a Jinx-centered spinoff.

Berry revealed in 2020, however, that the spinoff was ultimately canceled.

“It was very disappointing,” she told Digital Spy at the time. “It was ahead of its time. Nobody was ready to sink that kind of money into a Black female action star. They just weren’t sure of its value. That’s where we were then.”

She would later join the cast of 2004’s Catwoman, a DC Comics superhero movie based on the iconic Batman series villainess, though the project was a commercial disappointment and a critical failure at the time of its release.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

In a 2024 oral history on the making of the movie, however, Berry reacted to the film’s recent reevaluation in the eyes of a new generation of fans, who found value in the film’s campy tone and boundary-pushing casting that celebrated a Black female superhero at a time when most films in the genre were led by white men.

“Growing up as a Black woman, that’s two strikes against you. There’s an innate resilience. I hated that it got all put on me, and I hate that, to this day, it’s my failure. I know I can carry it,” Berry told EW of navigating the criticism that the film courted. “I still have a career 20 years later. It’s just part of my story. That’s okay, and I’ve carried other failures and successes. People have opinions, and sometimes they’re louder than others. You just have to keep moving.”