What follows is a thought experiment. Nobody, not the Duchess of Sussex, not her representatives and not Buckingham Palace, has said any of it.
Somewhere in a screening room this week, a handful of British actors are about to put on a dinner jacket and try very hard to look as if they’ve never wanted anything. According to Deadline, final screen tests for the next James Bond could begin as early as Friday and run into next week. Insiders name Jack Lowden, Callum Turner and Josh O’Connor among the contenders, none of it confirmed, with a decision expected by year’s end. Variety has the same shortlist and the same shrug about the timing.
So naturally, at The City Politic, we have been thinking about somebody else entirely.
Imagine the call came not from the casting director but from the Palace. Suppose King Charles, wearing the full weight of the Crown rather than a father-in-law’s cardigan, formally asked Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to serve her country as 007. Would she do it? And, more to the point, could anyone actually make that happen?
The franchise has new landlords
Start with the paperwork, because in modern Bond the paperwork is half the plot. The character no longer lives with the Broccoli family’s Eon Productions in the way he did for six decades. Amazon MGM Studios, which took over MGM in a deal of roughly $8.5 billion that closed in March 2022, now holds full creative control of the franchise. It has hired Amy Pascal and David Heyman to produce, Denis Villeneuve to direct and Steven Knight to write, and it brought in the casting director Nina Gold, who held first auditions in August, per Deadline.
A royal summons would therefore land on the desk of a Seattle-based retail company, which is a sentence Ian Fleming could not have written even after his fourth martini.
The Netflix problem
The Sussexes’ screen business runs through a different streamer altogether. In August 2025, Deadline reported that Archewell Productions had traded its rich 2020 exclusive with Netflix for a multi-year first-look deal, terms The New York Times described as looser than the original. By March 2026, Netflix’s content chief Bela Bajaria was telling Deadline, “We still have a relationship with them. We have movies in development with them,” even as the streamer stepped back from its investment in As Ever and from a third season of With Love, Meghan. In May came word, via Deadline and the BBC, of No Way Out, an Afghan war film written by Matt Charman, alongside projects including The Wedding Date and Meet Me at the Lake.
So in our hypothetical, the Duchess would be a Netflix producer starring in an Amazon picture by royal command. Somebody’s lawyers would need a very long weekend. A licensing arrangement between the two rivals for the most valuable spy in cinema is about as likely as Q handing back the Aston Martin with a full tank.
She can act. That was never the question.
Before she was a duchess, Meghan Markle spent seven seasons as the paralegal-turned-lawyer Rachel Zane on USA Network’s Suits, leaving the show ahead of her 2018 wedding. The series enjoyed a second life on streaming years later, which tells you something about the durability of a sharp suit and a sharper cross-examination. Rachel Zane, it should be said, was considerably better at reading a room than most of MI6.
Earlier this autumn, NBC News noted that the British press had carried unconfirmed reports that she could return to acting for the first time since Suits. Unconfirmed is the operative word, and we leave it exactly there.
The “official capacity” catch
Here is where the premise collapses into its own martini glass. For the King to ask in his official capacity, the Duchess would need an official capacity to be asked in. According to NBC News, a letter from the Lord Chamberlain written on the King’s behalf, issued after the couple moved to Britain in August for what was described as an “extended” stay, made clear that they remain non-working royals, that “their styles as His and Her Royal Highness remain in abeyance and are not used,” and that their position is “akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests.”
Private citizens with commercial interests do not, as a rule, get drafted into fictional intelligence services by the sovereign. The Royal Household deals in patronages, investitures and the occasional sternly worded letter, not three-picture deals. And the family weather remains unsettled: the Independent reports that Prince Harry, who told GQ “I want it to work out,” is in communication with his father while his brother is said to have no intention of engaging, and the BBC has reported his wish to reconcile. A request to save the free world would be a lot to put in a first text message.
And should Bond be a woman?
Then there is the oldest argument in the franchise after the vodka. Barbara Broccoli told The Guardian in 2018 that Bond “was written as a male,” adding, “We don’t have to turn male characters into women. Let’s just create more female characters.” Daniel Craig, speaking to Radio Times in 2021 as reported by People and IndieWire, asked, “Why should a woman play James Bond when there should be a part just as good as James Bond, but for a woman?”
The films themselves have flirted with the idea. In No Time to Die, Lashana Lynch’s Nomi briefly carried the 007 number, a passing of the badge that the official Bond franchise treated as a twist rather than a coronation. Amazon’s new regime has not said whether it shares Broccoli’s view, and its screen tests, by every account so far, are all men.
So: would she?
We genuinely don’t know, and neither does anyone else who is willing to say so on the record. It is entirely possible the Duchess would find the whole idea absurd. It is possible she would find it delightful. It is possible she would simply refer us to her producing slate, which is long, and her streaming partner, which is not Amazon.
What the thought experiment does reveal is how tangled the old fantasies have become. The Crown can’t commission a spy anymore; a retailer owns him. The American actress who married into the Windsors now produces for the company that dramatized them. And the actor who played Prince Charles on The Crown, Josh O’Connor, is reportedly up for the role of Bond himself.
If the King ever does pick up the phone, we’d like to be in the room. Until then, the license to kill stays with Amazon, and the license to speculate stays, cheerfully, with us.
Featured image: Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, at a reception at Government House, Wellington, New Zealand, on October 28, 2018. Photo by Mark Tantrum for the Office of the Governor-General of New Zealand, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
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