10 Women Who Should Be The Next James Bond

4. Miranda Raison

Whoa! What's that coming straight out of left field and landing a full fist over your stunned face!? Why, it's Miranda Raison of course, the closest thing the world currently has to girl-Bond.

The popularity of BBC spy drama Spooks is pretty variable - either you loved it, you're loosely familiar with it, or me mentioning it here is your first experience - but it was brilliant. In a frothy and polluted sea of awful spy adaptations, Spooks was a buoyant raft of dependability. Solid stories, believable characters, and firmly grounded in precisely how unglamorous that world really is. Its influences in Casino Royale weren't glaring, but it's naive to think they weren't there.

Within Spooks though, Miranda Raison was an utterly beaming light. Arriving in Season 4 as a journalist, she was a mainstay in the show up until Season 8 when , often eclipsing Middle Earth's Richard Armitage in both her dramatic and subtle scenes. She's not been overworked since, but her 6 episode run on the London-based 24 series was a timely reminder to audiences over how natural she is in this genre.

An obscure choice, but arguably the most natural.