When Queen Elizabeth II's Bond Girl Role Stole the Show at the 2012 London Olympics

Back in 2012, Queen Elizabeth II played a Bond girl during the London Olympics opening ceremony. She showed up in a little film alongside Daniel Craig, who was James Bond at the time. In this sketch, Craig as 007 arrives at Buckingham Palace, and the Queen greets, "Good evening, Mister Bond." It was a complete shocker and instantly became a hit.

The brief interaction set the stage for a thrilling sequence where the pair, accompanied by the Queen's beloved corgis, boarded a helicopter. The climax had a stunt double dressed as the Queen parachuting into the Olympic Stadium to the Bond theme. What made it even cooler was that the Queen herself came up with the idea to join in. Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who wrote the script for the Olympic ceremony, said in an interview that the Queen volunteered for the role, as per The Hollywood Reporter. "The queen's dresser said, 'Why are you doing all this?' And we told her, 'So we can make it look like the queen.' So she said, 'Oh, the queen wants to do it.' She put herself up for that, she wanted to be in the sketch," he said.

Cottrell-Boyce recounted, "On the day we were filming, she said to Danny Boyle, 'I think I should have a line.' She bagged that. She didn't have a line in the script." Tina Brown, author of The Palace Papers, disclosed, "Her whole family were kept out of the secret, and were astonished when they saw the Queen, as it seemed, descending from a parachute over the stadium! Prince William and Harry were heard shouting, 'Go, Granny, go!'"

In 2022, the Queen also starred in another beloved sketch, this time sharing tea with Paddington Bear for her Platinum Jubilee celebrations. Cottrell-Boyce praised her comedic timing, "She had a lot more lines in the Paddington sketch, partly because it was a lot cheaper to film her than to film Paddington. But she did that brilliantly and with evident enjoyment. And it wasn't easy. Paddington's not really there, so it's technically an amazing performance and a brilliantly timed comic performance," as per AV Club. 

Brown also commented on the monarch's sense of humor. "The Queen had a wonderfully dry and ironic sense of humor." She added, "The Queen came from the tradition espoused by her grandmother, Queen Mary, who famously said, 'We are the royal family. We're never tired, and we all love hospitals.'" She continued, "The Queen's mystique was really created by the fact that we never knew what she thought about anything. But her reassuring presence at every moment of our lives, in expressions of national joy, expressions of national anxiety, she has been there for us as the matriarch, essentially, of the nation."