I’d love to play a Bond villain… I already know my evil trait & star who’d be perfect 007, says Saoirse Ronan

THREE years after the release of No Time To Die, film fans are hotly anticipating who will fill Daniel Craig’s tuxedo as the ­seventh James Bond, and who will play the villain.

Now award-winning actress Saoirse Ronan has revealed her secret ambition to star as a ­dastardly Bond baddie — and she wants hunky husband Jack ­Lowden to be 007.

If her dream comes true, then Saoirse and Jack, who plays MI5 agent River Cartwright in award-winning Apple+ show Slow Horses, would be the first ever Mr and Mrs Bond, cementing their position as one of Britain’s hottest showbiz couples.

Issuing a plea to 007 producer Barbara Broccoli, Saoirse said: “I’ve always said that I want to play a Bond villain.

“I’d really love to do that.

“I’m serious, I would.

“If anyone knows Barbara Broccoli, please tell her.

“There is something nice about just going, ‘I’m going to do a big movie next. And I know it’ll be seen by people’.”

While 007 is synonymous with Bond Girls, female lead villains have historically been scarcer.

In 1999’s The World Is Not Enough, Sophie Marceau played the first female lead Bond villain, Elektra King.

Other female baddies have included Grace Jones as assassin-turned-ally May Day in 1985’s A View To A Kill, and Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp, who murdered her victims between her muscular thighs, in 1995’s GoldenEye.

When asked what her evil trait might be as a baddie, such as an eye patch or a white cat, Saoirse, 30, suggested a limp.

She said: “I’m conscious of being blonde because I feel like a lot of female villains in movies are always super-blonde and evil-looking.

“I’d want to break the trend, but honestly, it’s whatever Barbara wants!”

And when asked who she would pick if either she could be the villain or her husband could be 007, Saoirse told the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast: “He should be Bond, if it’s a choice between the two.

“Isn’t it nice that I’ve done that?”

Jack, 34, who was born in Essex and brought up in Scotland, is currently tipped among the bookies’ favourites to land the coveted role.

He became a household name playing Kenneth Noye in hit BBC drama The Gold alongside his turn in Slow Horses.

Producers have hinted that the new Bond might not be a man, and it is a role that historically has sent actors’ careers to the A-list.

Scot Sean Connery was relatively unknown when he clinched the role in 1962, while Aussie George Lazenby was a car salesman and model who bumped into Barbara’s father, 007 producer Albert “‘Cubby” Broccoli, at the barbers, before becoming the spy for a one-off outing in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969.

Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan also took on the part.

Latest Bond Daniel Craig had enjoyed relative success before his fame rocketed when he was cast as the sixth 007 in 2006.

Oscar nomination

Now Jack is among the contenders hoping to be named as the seventh incarnation of the suave hero — along with Aaron Taylor-Johnson, The Witcher star Henry Cavill, Bridgerton’s Rege-Jean Page and James Norton from Happy Valley.

“It’s very flattering to be asked about it,” Jack said recently.

“I’m still trying to get over the fact that Daniel Craig isn’t doing it any more.”

Jack met Irish star Saoirse, who appeared in 2009’s The Lovely Bones, in 2018 on the set of their film, Mary Queen Of Scots — and once likened her to a Ferrari.

They got engaged during a hiking holiday last summer and tied the knot in a low-key ceremony near their Edinburgh apartment in July.

The couple have a waterfront cottage in west Cork and a £2.5million house in North London, which they share with pet terrier Fran.

Jack also produced Saoirse’s new film The Outrun, which is expected to win her a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

She looks set to receive another nomination in the Best Supporting Actress category — for Steve McQueen’s World War Two epic drama Blitz.

If she is double-nominated, it would make her the youngest — and only the thirteenth person — to achieve that accolade.

Saoirse already has four other Oscar nominations under her belt, including Best Supporting Actress, for playing Keira Knightley’s sister in Atonement when she was 13.

Since then, she has gone on to land Best Actress nods for Brooklyn in 2016, Lady Bird in 2018 and 2020’s Little Women.

In The Outrun, Saoirse plays Rona, a struggling alcoholic fresh out of rehab who returns to the wild Orkney islands after a decade away.

Jack persuaded her to take the part after reading Amy Liptrot’s gritty memoir, on which it is based, during lockdown.

“We were reading a book a week, like everyone else. We had nothing else to do,” she recalled.

“As soon as he finished it, he handed it to me and said, ‘This is the next role you have to play’. And so I read it straight away and I agreed with him. I wasn’t going to let anyone else play her!”

Saoirse revealed she has friends who have battled similar addiction issues to her character.

“The only thing I was anxious about was not doing justice to the portrayal of an alcoholic,” she said.

“I didn’t want it to be a caricature version of what that type of drunk looks like, which is so far removed from someone just going out for a night with their friends. It’s so much more than that.

Harrowing scene

“I’ve seen that in my own life, and the damage it can do to everyone around the person who’s struggling from that particular addiction.

“I have people close to me who have suffered from this addiction, some of whom have come out the other side and are in recovery and some who aren’t.”

Saoirse admits she was over-whelmed filming one harrowing scene when her co-star, Paapa Essiedu, who plays her partner Daynin, poured her booze away after a night out.

She said: “I hate to use this word, but it did kind of trigger me.

“They’ve just returned home and she’s ruined this very important night for him.

“He starts to pour bottles of wine down the sink and she goes into this really chaotic, hysterical, emotional state and becomes mean and this very kind of ugly version of herself.

“It brought up memories for me — physically and emotionally — feeling those things and re-enacting them.

“I needed to step away as soon as we finished. That was overwhelming.

“But apart from that, it was a very insightful and cathartic experience.

“It’s why I wanted to do it.

“It’s something, like many others, that has affected my life.

"It’s the confusion and frustration that comes with watching a loved one go through something like that — feeling like you’re not enough, not enough to change them.

“You’re drawing from your past and empathising with your character and so it’s this really intense collision of the project and your own life in moments like that.

“It was so relatable to everyone and incredibly personal to me in terms of the subject matter.

“Because I was playing someone who was under the influence, it meant their judgment was clouded so often that I could make the performance as big, as small, as ridiculous, as funny, as heartbreaking, as beautiful, as ugly as I wanted it to be, because for a large section of the movie, I’m not in my right mind.

"I don’t want this to sound insensitive, but it is a gift as an actor to be given a role like that.”

As for the future, Saoirse is keeping herself “open” to new roles.

“You never know what script is going to awaken something in you until you actually read it,” she said.

“I think the one thing I’ve always tried to stick to is that I really don’t want to repeat myself. And that’s hard.”

She would also like to try her hand at directing.

“I used to have my little JVC camcorder when I was younger, and I’d make all my friends get in these terrible movies that I’d written.

“I would love to do that at some stage.”