Agent Seduction: Part 1: The Initiation (lesbian, hypnotism, force, military, erotica, adult)

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Tilly: [The rating board] said, "It looks like they're really doing it." And the [Wachowskis] go, "Let me get this straight. If the girls weren't such good actresses, you wouldn't have a problem?" They were embarrassed, and they said, "Yes." I'm not about to put Kissing Jessica Stein in this category, because it's too weak of a queer film to be even considered. There's also Mulholland Drive, which had some very brief hot queer moments relative to its era (2001). Heavenly Creatures (1994) served the queer goth community particularly well. Sadly, that community is relatively small. To know that I could finally come clean to my worrisome friends felt liberating beyond belief. I didn’t care about sacrificing my youth to move to outer London with a swarm of forty-somethings. All I wanted was to be with her full-time, and for it to be out in the open that we were together. Gershon: I knew I had to curl [my toes] on cue. I think it could have been a little bit more connected to an orgasm or to a sexual feeling. I felt it was more a mechanical thing. [But] it was very fluid. No pun intended. In between these roles, Lynch hopped from job to job: temping at a courtesy-car company and behind the reception of a doctors’ surgery in central London. “When I did Still Star-Crossed, I was working for the NHS again,” she says. “I remember when I went away, I didn’t have any money; I literally had about 2p in my bank. And when you work you don’t get paid straight away, so I’m the lead in this show, but still can’t afford my rent. And that was my last hurrah of, quote-unquote, normal work.” As a Jamaican woman you know how to stand up for yourself

Mercifully, Lynch emerged from filming relatively unscathed, unlike Craig, who has lost teeth, broken his leg and had the tip of a finger sliced off doing Bond. “The stunt team were like, ‘Who are you? An alien?’” says Lynch. “Everyone who does stunts always has some kind of injury.”Tilly: I did have so many girls come up to me—and so many drag queens saying their drag name was Violet. It really made me feel, in a weird way, like I had a responsibility when all these girls would come up to me and say that they came out of the closet and realized they were gay after they saw this film.

Throughout TV and movie history, lesbians and cops are like peanut butter and jelly, and it seems like half of the time a TV show or movie (that isn't about lesbians) has an adult lesbian character, she's a cop.Gershon: Susie Bright, she was supposed to take me around. The Wachowskis thought it was important that I meet her. She was an authority figure, and [a writer] in the lesbian community. I was really excited to talk to her. Lynch, who gracefully declines to say whether she’s in a relationship, found salvation in her “indoor jungle”. “Quite literally, my plants have saved my life,” she says. “I just like watering them, watching them grow, playing them good music. I’ve been playing them Cleo Sol and Kaytranada – they like calm, melodic music and being turned every couple of days. So basically, they’ve danced through me.” Gershon: It was like the four of us having sex. It was like: "Foot! Wall! Head!" It was so choreographed. The camera [is] moving around, and you have one wall go up, another wall went down. Has she been climbing the walls? “You know what? No, weirdly,” says Lynch. “I’m a true believer in everything having its time. And for whatever reason the world needed its time to reset. So I feel a little weirdly unshakable at the moment. Like, if anything else was to happen tomorrow, I’d be like, ‘OK, cool, how do we get present to what’s happening?’ So I’ve had to calm down everyone else around me.” I still have to try to change the world in a little way that I know how’: Lashana Lynch wears dress by edelinelee.com; earrings by farisfaris.com. Photograph: Gustavo Papaleo/The Observer

Gershon: God forbid we have these two women actually in love. We had to go with the "f—ing" scene. In the "f—ing" scene, they were really going at it, and it wasn't as emotional. They were okay with that, which is bulls–t. Gershon: I really liked the hip [tattoo] that wrapped around my hip and crept up. You saw the top of it coming out of my pants sometimes. I thought that was really sexy. I had seen that on some girl at a bar, and I was like, "Oh that's hot."Gershon: I'm doing the pipes. I was a little paranoid. I'm definitely not good at any of that stuff, so I just needed to be convincing…I kind of got into it. It's so dirty and messy, and you're shoving this thing in the plug. It was fun. I just wanted to look cool, like I knew what I was doing. I liked all the physical activity. It just made me feel like I was doing all the things that I wish I knew in real life. I remember my mom said, "You're a really good actress." I asked, "Why?" She said, "Because I believed the plumbing stuff." Gershon: I'm really proud of this movie, probably more than any other film I've done. These women are sexy and they're smart. They outsmart the bad guys. And they're funny and witty. They were into each other; they didn't need a man to help them. That was all a combination no one had really seen before. These parts weren't around a lot. Lynch was born in Shepherd’s Bush in 1987, a second-generation Jamaican child of a Windrush family. Her father was a social worker for young teens and her mother is a housing manager. “They were both in service, both helping people,” she says. They separated when she was young, but Lynch continued to see a lot of both of them. She also had a formative period, between primary and secondary schools, when she lived with her grandmother. “I think that’s where the maturity came on board,” says Lynch. “You’re with an old lady, so she’s gonna teach you old-lady things!” Tilly: That was my dress. Those are my earrings. That's my watch. I wore pretty much all my own clothes…After the movie, I gave some of the clothes to my sister. The dress, in the last scene, she shows up wearing it [one time] and I'm like, "You know how many lesbians would love to get their hands on that dress. That's an artifact! It should be in a museum!" She's like, "It's my favorite dress!" Lynch, as you may well have suspected, got the part. In No Time to Die, the 33-year-old from west London will play Nomi, an MI6 agent. That much we know for sure. There are persistent rumours that Nomi inherits the 007 designation from Bond, who has handed in the keys to the Aston and retired to Jamaica with the French psychologist Madeleine Swann ( Léa Seydoux). Let’s pull this plaster off: are you, Lashana Lynch, the next James Bond? “Nooo! You don’t want me!” she says, with a fit of giggles. “I’d just be like” – she feigns ditsiness – “‘Erm, right, so where do you start again?’”

Gershon: [The Wachowskis] knew every angle, every cut. They came from doing graphic novels so they really had it in their heads. The stunt team have now trained me for life. I’m very happy’: Lashana Lynch wears trench coat by acnestudios.com. Photograph: Gustavo Papaleo/The ObserverThe introduction of Lynch’s Nomi is clearly part of a strategy for keeping 007 relevant in the modern world. “I think they were just looking for someone who would be able to be a match for Bond,” says Lynch. “Who would be able to stand up and be vocal and forthright and strong and able to handle a weapon, able to handle herself and not someone who takes any crap from anybody at all. Then, as it unfolded, she became this quite complicated, free, open-minded vocal human being who brings a really nice twist to MI6.” Sitting in meetings with her at the prominent literary agency where we both worked left me feeling weak. Usually never short of things to say, in her presence, I’d marvel at her ability to drain all quips from my mind, leaving my mouth bone-dry. But I knew the cliché and I refused to succumb to the stereotype of being the young, ambitious 25-year-old who screws the boss. This seems like it shouldn't be a victory. And yet, the list of movies who've accomplished the same feat is painfully abbreviated. Don't talk to me about Blue is the Warmest Color, a movie made famous for its extended, impractical sex scenes and allegations of harassment by its director, Abdellatif Kechiche. Kechiche reportedly bullied the two female protagonists as well as his staff, forcing them to work 16-hour workdays under extreme pressure. Critics further accused the director of creating "voyeuristic" sex scenes intended to solicit the male gaze.