Olenna Tyrell in On Her Majesty's Secret Service
Fans of Diana Rigg’s Olenna Tyrell, Game of Thrones’ Queen of Thorns, should not be surprised to know that this razor–sharp matriarch was once the only Bond girl to make the spy settle down in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. OHMSS features some bizarre digressions, but is never better then when Rigg’s Tracy di Vincenzo shares the screen with one–and–done Bond George Lazenby in 1969. Ultimately, the massive action climax on a Swiss mountaintop lair puts this movie in Bond’s top tier. Lazenby and Rigg have tremendous chemistry throughout, but the film’s last sequence is a game changer. Olenna Tyrell sometimes waxes on about her brilliant time at court when she was young. Turns out the Queen of Thorns is probably referring to her time as a Bond girl.
High Sparrow in Tomorrow Never Dies:
When Game of Thrones taps a noteworthy actor like Jonathan Pryce for a potentially game changing role, book readers and viewers alike know the showrunners have big plans in store for his character, High Sparrow. But before all that dragon business, Pryce drew attention as a splashy villain in 1997’s little–referenced Tomorrow Never Dies. One of the more straight action thrillers in the Bond arsenal, 007 is trying to stop a media mogul, played by Pryce, from inducing war between China and the UK for his own profit. As the second of Brosnan’s four Bond films, it’s the most action–y, and Jonathan Pryce’s turn as Rupert Murdoch’s alternate ego Elliot Carver is wonderfully compelling. Pryce has a talent for megalomaniac roles, which only ensures that Queen Regent Cersei will have her work cut out for her dealing with Westeros’ current reigning religious zealot.
Ned Stark in GoldenEye:
Sean Bean’s Ned Stark in Game of Thrones and Sean Bean’s Alec Trevelyan in 1995’s GoldenEye is more like Ned Stark than one would think. Sure, the actor’s GoT patriarch is honorable to a fault while the actor’s Trevelyan is a rogue agent gone supervillain, but the basic character arc in both cases is still fish out of water. In GoldenEye, Bean’s character, Alec Trevelyan, and his Cossack parents have struggled since WWII. Trevelyan’s motivations are fairly simple: he wants to rob the Bank of England and wipe out their electronics with an EMP as revenge for the Allied Powers role in his parents’ deaths. Trevelyan may not make it out alive (Ed. note: We refuse to call this a spoiler; Sean Bean always dies.), but Brosnan and director Robert Campbell build an airproof case for Bond’s continued relevance as a spy even after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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