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TL;DR:
A decade before her death on Sept. 8, Queen Elizabeth II made a cameo in a James Bond video at the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Originally she didn’t have any lines. However, the video’s co-writer says the queen felt she “should have a line” before improvising.
According to Variety, during a BBC Breakfast news appearance, Frank Cottrell Boyce, the co-writer of Queen Elizabeth’s James Bond video, recalled how it was made.
Opening ceremony production designer Mark Tildesley had come up with the idea of Queen Elizabeth jumping out of a helicopter into Olympic Stadium with Daniel Craig. “Nobody had a better idea,” Cottrell Boyce told host Naga Munchetty.
He continued, saying opening ceremony producer Tracey Seaward was in for a surprise during a Buckingham Palace meeting.
He said Seaward went to ask permission to use the queen’s likeness and dress a body double in the same outfit the queen would be wearing to the ceremony. Instead, the queen offered to participate.
“The queen’s dresser, this remarkable woman, Angela Kelly, said, ‘Oh, why are you doing all this?’ And [Seaward] said, ‘So that we can make it look as though it’s the queen,’” Cottrell Boyce recalled. “And Angela went, ‘Oh, the queen wants to do it.’”
“So she put herself up for that,” he added. “She was game — she wanted to be in that sketch.”
Initially, the Queen Elizabeth James video didn’t include any lines for the monarch. The reason? “Probably because when I was typing the script, I didn’t quite know how you would type the character of the queen … what would you type?’” Cottrell Boyce said.
“Good evening, Mr. Bond,” the queen’s only line in the video, came from the monarch herself, he continued. Queen Elizabeth told director Danny Boyle she “should have a line.”
“On the day that we were filming, she said to Danny Boyle, ‘I think I think I should have a line.’ So she bagged that line, there wasn’t a line in the script – she improv’d,” he told BBC Breakfast.
In 2022, the queen found herself in front of the camera once again. She appeared in a Paddington bear video to mark 70 years on the throne.
Unveiled during Platinum Jubilee weekend, the queen had more lines “partly because it was a lot cheaper to film her than it was to film Paddington,” the writer explained. Calling it a “brilliantly timed comic performance,” Cottrell Boyce noted “real acting” from the queen.
“Paddington isn’t really in the room,” he said. “She’s acting with an eye-line and with someone pretending to be Paddington. That’s proper acting going on. But I also think it’s true happiness.”
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