An actress can’t play Indiana Jones – he is male to the core
The only thing going for the suggestion that Phoebe Waller-bridge might replace Harrison Ford as the gentleman archaeologist adventurer is that Indiana Jones is bit of a girl’s name, so at least that would fit. Everything else about the idea is bad.
In the first place, Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. He has inhabited the character longer than anyone can remember, having first surfaced during the rise of Hitler, and the entire franchise should really die with him, though letting a profitable franchise die isn’t the Disney way. The nearest thing to a woman adventurer on Harrison Ford lines is the weird computer animation escapee Lara Croft.
The real reason why the notion sucks is that you just know that the sole reason for doing it isn’t that Waller-bridge is doing sterling work as Indiana’s sidekick in the latest film; it’s simply that almost every role goes now, pretty well by default, to a woman.
Waller-bridge is a terrific performer and writer, though I didn’t really care for the Fleabag phenomenon, but that clever, funny, female persona is all wrong for a character for whom the default adjective is rugged, as in Boy’s Own action-hero rugged. Indiana Jones is – how can I put this – a man’s role.
But the notion that there are parts which are essentially male and that were originally intended for a man seems like a challenge for a particular kind of producer. The politics of the age means they are uneasy with prescriptive gendered casting, which is why we have had the worst Dr Who ever in Jodie Whittaker, a series that shed viewers by the bucketload (though in fairness, the terrible woke storylines didn’t help).
It’s also why it’s quite possible that Daniel Craig may be replaced by a woman for no better reason than we can. But if you read the James Bond books, they give us an unequivocal man’s man, and not a terribly nice one, either. Lose James and you lose Bond. I would say the same about Sherlock Holmes, the most masculine character ever, except that battle has already been lost, with Netflix’s Enola Holmes.
Some parts are made for men. Can we not live with that?
A role that was always meant for a woman is that of the president of a women’s college, as in my old Cambridge College, New Hall, which humiliatingly took a £30 million donation to change its name to Murray Edwards College. Its present head is Dorothy Byrne, former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4. She wants 7 per cent of the Cambridge intake to come from private schools because that reflects the percentage in the population at large.
Oh, please. Any normal admissions tutor takes a candidate’s background into account, but once you start seeing off bright applicants because they went to private schools, you’ve lost the plot. One casualty of Dorothy’s genius idea could have been the college founder, Dame Rosemary Murray, a chemist, and the scariest woman I’ve ever met. She was privately educated and she would have eaten Dorothy for breakfast.
Yesterday I got a delivery from Amazon. It’s part of a trend for private courier companies for seven-day deliveries, a move that can only lead to pressure on the unfortunate Post Office to follow suit. Couldn’t Amazon give us a box to tick or something when we order things to decline Sunday deliveries? Even couriers need a day of rest.