Female spies have come in from the cold. What took Hollywood so long?

There have always been female spies. Look back at any historical conflict and you’ll find women hard at work in the shadows. Josephine Baker, a jazz singer and silent film actress, just happened to moonlight for the French Resistance during World War II. Virginia Hall went from setting up spy networks in Lyon to being one of the first women at the CIA. Anna Chapman was arrested in the US in 2010 on foreign conspiracy and espionage charges before being deported back to Russia (where she became a successful catwalk model and television presenter).

From left: Josephine Baker, Anna Chapman and Virginia Hall.

There have always been female spies in film and TV too, from Ilsa Lund in Casablanca to Agent 99 in Get Smart and the original Charlie’s Angels – but these characters were sidekicks and sexpots first, secret agents second. Only in the past decade has Hollywood caught up: as we see in Cate Blanchett’s latest outing, Black Bag, female spies have come into their own in stories that do more than merely swap out “James” for “Jane”.

Speaking of James, watching every Bond movie in sequence (as I did in the lead-up to No Time to Die) serves as a pretty good primer on pop culture’s ever-evolving relationship with female spies. Just as Bond’s nemeses have graduated from two-bit Russian hoods to crooked environmentalists (then back to Russians), so, too, have the women around him transformed to more accurately reflect the times.

In 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun, Britt Ekland totters about the villain’s lair in a bikini before accidentally activating an energy beam that nearly kills Roger Moore’s 007. Fast forward 47 years, and No Time to Die’s Ana de Armas is taking out an entire squad of henchmen with nothing but an empty sub-machinegun and a cocktail dress. Progress has been made.

Ana de Armas goes full-barrelled in No Time To Die.

Any time James Bond gets put out to pasture, the conversation turns to which chisel-jawed hunk will be next to don the tux. More recently, people have asked if it’s time for 007 to be played by a woman. Barbara Broccoli – daughter of mega-producer Albert R. Broccoli and, until very recently, steward of all things Bond – has put paid to this idea: “I’m not particularly interested in taking a male character and having a woman play it … women are far more interesting than that. I believe we should be creating new characters for women.”

Happily, our cinemas and TV screens have welcomed a wave of compelling and crowd-pleasing female agents, in stories that use well-worn spy traditions to say something new and specific about women’s experiences. What is a safety deposit box filled with fake passports if not the ideal metaphor for a woman striving to be friend, wife, mother, colleague and daughter?

Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 in the 1960s TV series Get Smart.Credit: Getty Images

Just like their overlooked counterparts in the traditional canon, modern women spies can fly under the radar – and this is partly what makes them, in trade-craft terms, such high-value assets. Take Catherine Standish in Slow Horses, played by Saskia Reeves: mild-mannered, unassuming, and dressed like a member of a John le Carré secretarial pool, she’s a key player precisely because people overlook her. Or Keira Knightley’s duplicitous Helen Webb in Black Doves. What better cover for a ruthless spy-for-hire tasked with selling state secrets than that of doting wife to the minister of defence and loving mother to his children?

At their heart, spy stories have always been about identity and duty, two things female characters have been historically expected to defer to the men in their lives. This is why you’ll often find female spies thriving in domestic settings – the ultimate social camouflage – and why putting two spies together (as with Black Bag’s Mr and Mrs Woodhouse) is the perfect device for interrogating relationships.

For all its fighter jets and exploding bridges, James Cameron’s True Lies is about the complacency that can creep into even the most loving of marriages (nothing like foiling a terrorist plot to rekindle old passions). Even in espionage, open and honest communication saves the day; the film closes with husband and wife undercover, dancing the tango (I can’t see Black Doves ending nearly this cheerily).

The splashy 2005 Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt spy-versus-spy vehicle Mr & Mrs Smith (which starts with a tango) was remade into an Amazon series starring Maya Erskine and Donald Glover last year, using its extended runtime to thoroughly excavate modern fears around trust and intimacy. The Anna Chapman scandal partly inspired the FX series The Americans, in which Keri Russell plays one half of a duo of KGB spies buried deep in Cold War-era Washington – surely a work/life arrangement that would test any marriage.

All relationships have secrets. What makes these spies-in-love stories such a welcome update to the old formula is the sense of shared subterfuge. Gone are the days of the uncomplicated killer playboy, or the tortured male spook in a world of women who could never possibly understand his burden or his gifts. For all to be fair in love and war, there must be secrets on both sides – and if the opening of Mr & Mrs Smith or the finale of True Lies tells us anything, it’s that espionage may be a lonely game, but it still takes two to tango.

The female spies we loved

Lashana Lynch as Nomi, No Time to Die

Credit: Nicola Dove/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

In what felt like a knowing wink to the online fervour around Daniel Craig’s eventual replacement, No Time to Die sees a retired James Bond reluctantly returning to active duty only to find he has been succeeded by (gasp) a woman. New MI6 operative Nomi has taken on the mantle of 007, and she wears it well. Though the ink is barely dry on her licence to kill, she’s as charming, ruthless and deadly as her predecessor ever was.

Keira Knightley as Helen Webb, Black Doves

Credit: Stefania Rosini/Netflix

As comfortable at a diplomatic cocktail function as she is in a knife fight, Helen Webb is the perfect female spy for our times; torn between self-betterment and loyalty to her friends, she’s an ethically ambivalent anti-hero with zero patriotic scruples and fabulous taste in longline woollen coats. Netflix green-lit a second season before the bullet casings from the first had even settled, and with Helen having positioned her unsuspecting hubby as the next UK prime minister, the stakes – and the body count – will no doubt be even higher.

Melissa McCarthy as Susan Cooper, Spy

As Melissa McCarthy’s CIA analyst-turned-field agent marauds through Europe, Spy does a dangerously fun job of replicating the Bonds and Bournes it sets out to parody, mostly due to the brilliant chemistry McCarthy shares with her co-stars. There’s Jude Law as a very obvious 007 stand-in, Rose Byrne as a beehive-haired arms dealer, and Jason Statham as a hyper-masc rogue agent.

Sandra Oh as Eve Polastri, Killing Eve

Credit: Nick Briggs

Killing Eve was a cultural behemoth at the time of its arrival in 2018, a psychosexual cat-and-mouse game between British intelligence agent Eve Polastri (a totally reinvented post-Grey’s Anatomy Oh) and her mark, the international assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). With the first season helmed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, No Time to Die) and the second by Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn), Killing Eve was a major inflection point not just for female-led spy thrillers, but for a new generation of screen women.

Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison, Homeland

Credit: Sifeddine Elamine/Showtime

A worthy small-screen counterpart to Jessica Chastain’s CIA analyst in Zero Dark Thirty, Homeland’s Carrie Mathison was another defining character of the 2010s war-on-terror zeitgeist. We first meet her as a disgraced CIA agent who suspects a repatriated marine of plotting a terrorist attack. But over the course of eight seasons, she moves up in the service, flits between intelligence and politics, and moves from Washington to Afghanistan and Berlin to Russia, blazing through the same geopolitical landscapes usually reserved for guys named Jack (Bauer, Ryan, et al.).

Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow, Alias

Was there any greater pleasure than sitting down on a Sunday night in the mid-2000s to see what colour wig Jennifer Garner would be wearing in that week’s Alias? A trashily fun case-of-the-week spy saga that ran for 105 episodes and made a star out of Garner (as well as its creator, JJ Abrams), Alias feels like an important stepping stone between the femmes fatales of the ’90s – think The Long Kiss Goodnight and La Femme Nikita – and the three-dimensional female spies of the 2010s, your Red Sparrows and Atomic Blondes, in which emotional interiority and tight leather pants needn’t be mutually exclusive.

Black Bag is in cinemas from March 13.