Phoebe Waller-Bridge says she ‘can’t take credit’ for Bond 25 script

The Fleabag creator and star also revealed she is working on a top secret film script

Phoebe Waller-Bridge has said that she “can’t take credit” for the script for the forthcoming Bond 25, after being recruited to help write it.

Speaking in a cover story for the new issue of Hollywood Reporter, the Fleabag creator said that while she understood the attention her hiring has received, it doesn’t mean her fingerprints will be all over the finished product. “A lot has been made of me coming on board because I’m a woman, and that’s wonderful,” she said. “But also I can’t take credit for the movie that was written. It’s [director and co-screenwriter] Cary [Fukunaga’s] movie.”

Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the cover of this week’s issue of Hollywood Reporter

She additionally revealed that the same impulse that drove her to accept the Bond 25 job fuelled her desire to adapt Killing Eve for television. “There’s something about James Bond that always intrigued me in a similar way that Villanelle did,” she said, referring to Jodie Comer’s glamorous assassin on the series. “They live a fantasy! But it’s a life none of us would ever want, if we’re honest. We don’t want to go put a bullet in someone’s head to sleep with people and have martinis. It’s a kind of fantasy nightmare.”

The actor and writer also declared to the Hollywood Reporter that she is working on her first solo film script, with plans to direct it once it comes to fruition, saying: “The day I wrapped Fleabag, I went to bed thinking, ‘I’m never going to have another idea again. Oh s**t.’ I woke up with the vision of this film.”

She additionally said that she will not take it out to financiers until it is finished, wants it to have a cinema release as opposed to a Netflix release, and has no plans to star in it, though added with a laugh: “I blatantly will end up in it.”