IT STILL haunts her, even after all these years. If only the timing had been right . . . Catherine Zeta-Jones is telling me about The One That Got Away – and no, we’re not talking about a man, but a role. The role she was born to play.
“I had the chops to be a female Bond?” explains the Oscar-winning star of Chicago. “For many years I was Bond material. Actually, I used to dream of being a female spy when I was a kid – if I didn’t make it as an actress. Then, later I had big aspirations, and this was before there was even a female Doctor Who.”
Why the past tense? There’s a well-publicised 007 vacancy, and Catherine is on a professional roll. Netflix has just premiered Tim Burton’s Addams Family series, Wednesday – in which she plays Morticia Addams – and this month she stars in the long-awaited Disney+ TV spin-off to the hit Nicolas Cage movies, National Treasure: Edge of History.
Bond producer Barbara Broccoli might be reading this, I say, and barking out to her assistant, “Get me Catherine on the phone!”
So, if she gets the call? “Oh, it would absolutely be a yes. No question.”
Deadpanning is just one form of humour that doesn’t usually translate over Zoom. People rarely translate over Zoom. But Catherine is different. From the second the 53-year-old is beamed into my LA home from her Paris hotel suite – all in black, flashes of gold and silver rings on her hands – it’s like we’re in the same
