After years of speculation over who might fill Daniel Craig’s brogues, the announcement of the next James Bond finally seems imminent. Reportedly under consideration are names like Callum Turner, Jacob Elordi, Aaron Taylor-Johnson—all solid, though not quite thrilling, choices. But if I could throw just one more into the mix, it would be Anya Taylor-Joy. She’s not the most obvious candidate, to be sure. She isn’t British, though she did spend much of her childhood in London (Elordi is Australian). And among the small-minded, the idea of a female Bond remains unthinkable. Still, any reasonable person who witnesses her performance in the propulsive yet emotionally grounded Apple TV crime thriller Lucky is bound to find themselves thinking of 007.
Premiering with two episodes on July 15, this adaptation of Marissa Stapley’s 2021 best-seller casts Taylor-Joy in a role that combines the physicality of her Furiosa hero, the cerebral acuity of her character in The Queen’s Gambit, and the mesmerizing strangeness that has been her signature since The Witch. Taylor-Joy’s Luciana “Lucky” Armstrong is a con artist in a desperate situation. Both second-generation criminals who’ve tried to go straight, she and her husband, Cary (Drew Starkey), have just pulled off a classic final heist—you know, the kind that always goes wrong—and are celebrating in Vegas with plans to make an early-morning escape into anonymity. But when Lucky awakens, disoriented, in her hotel room, Cary and the cash have vanished. She’s left running from not just a tenacious FBI agent (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s Billie Rand), but also Priscilla, a deceptively refined crime boss played with icy calm by Annette Bening. The only person she trusts, her grifter dad, John (the recently ubiquitous Timothy Olyphant), is in prison.
It should be obvious that skillful pacing is a bare-minimum requirement for a good thriller, but the streaming era has produced so many bloated takes on the genre that Lucky’s co
