"I am Our Lord's chosen instrument to whip the devil out of you, and I have to do my duty no matter how much pain it causes me. So be prepared to drink your cocktails standing up for a few days."
Fleming had many girlfriends but seems never to have been in love until he met Ann O’Neill, née Charteris, during the war. To give some idea of the complexities involved, he was staying with her when her first husband, Lord O’Neill, was killed, and was asked by her to break the news to the man who was to become her second husband, Esmond Harmsworth, later Rothermere. It was Fleming’s inaction which led to Ann marrying Rothermere, but after the war Ann and Ian slowly and tormentedly realised their mistake, if that is what it was, and married in 1952. It was on honeymoon, ensconced in their Jamaican retreat, that O'Neill proved decisive in making him sit down and get on with his long-contemplated task of writing a book, Casino Royale. They were married for 12 years until Fleming's death in 1964. The part may prove to be another saucy role for Pulver as a key component of their union seemes to have been a shared love of spanking and sexual role-play. "I am Our Lord's chosen instrument to whip the devil out of you, and I have to do my duty no matter how much pain it causes me. So be prepared to drink your cocktails standing up for a few days," he wrote in a letter to her.
The spanking wouldn’t matter to anyone now, notes John Lanchester, if it didn’t show up in the Bond books, but of course it does. Simon Winder, the editor responsible for republishing all the novels has said simply and robustly that Fleming was a sado-masochist. "This is a sensible way of dealing with the profoundly unsensible sexual attitudes in the novels," states Lanchester. "It is not anachronistic to find the erotic climate of the novels strange and distracting, since plenty of people were distracted by it at the time. Christopher Hitchens quotes Fleming’s friend and neighbour Noël Coward on the subject of Honeychile Rider’s world-famous bottom, 'almost as firm and rounded as a boy’s': 'I know we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?'" In a way, we are now better placed to see the sexual attitudes of the books for what they are, part of the wish fulfilment in which the Bond novels bask, in which KGB agents disguised as English gents expose themselves as impostors by ordering red wine with fish, and tough dykes called Pussy Galore secretly long to be converted from sapphism by our cruelly handsome hero. "The contrast between the real woman Fleming loved, complicated and demanding and grown-up as she was, and the wank-fantasies of the novels, must have been deeply embarrassing for Ann, and it is no wonder that she disliked Bond as much as she did," says Lanchester.
Of course, sado-masochism permeates the whole atmosphere of the Bond books. It is easy to forget until re-reading them just how often Bond gets beaten up, how long he spends recovering from it, and how a woman is usually involved in the recuperative process. The strongest currents of feeling in the novels always circulate around these sequences. "It would be an exaggeration, but not all that much of an exaggeration, to say that the Bond novels are at heart a series of lavish beatings strung together with thriller elements," reasons Lanchester. "The first of these beatings is the most famous – that’s the one in Casino Royale where Bond sits in a chair with a hole cut out of it and has his testicles thrashed with a carpet beater – but not one of the novels is without its scene of Bond in torment. The tenderest, most yearning word in Fleming’s lexicon is 'cruel'.
Also cast in Fleming is Annabelle Wallis (Pan Am, The Tudors) as Muriel, a young girl who catches Ian's eye, and Lesley Manville (Vera Drake) as the author's mother Eve. Ian's brother - the celebrated travel writer and war hero Peter - will be portrayed by Hellboy's Rupert Evans, while Samuel West (Mr Selfridge) will play director of naval intelligence Admiral John Godfrey - who shaped Fleming's portrayal of Bond's boss M. The final cast addition is Anna Chancellor (The Hour), who will play the Admiral's secretary Lieutenant Monday - one of Fleming's inspirations for Miss Moneypenny. Fleming will be shot on location in the United Kingdom and Budapest in early 2013 and will transmit on Sky Atlantic HD later this year.
Looking further ahead, and perhaps inspired by Ann O'Neill, Pulver has said that she would love to reprise her risque role as whip-smart dominatrix Irene Adler in Sherlock. Pulver's role in series two episode 'A Scandal in Belgravia' saw her dress up in S&M gear, and strip down to nothing, as her character engaged in a sexually charged battle of wits with the famous detective. It concluded with Adler facing an ambiguous future. "The response has been quite enormous to be honest," Lara told AccessHollywood.com, referring to how fans have taken to her Sherlock character, who entranced Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes. When asked if she would go back, Pulver teased: "Absolutely… if the potential is there for the character to return. She is alive. He did save her. Then, it would be an absolute pleasure to return."
Pulver was romantically linked to Cumberbatch last year, but swiftly took to Twitter to insist that they are just friends. She famously had some very intimate scenes with Benedict in Sherlock and she said filming those helped them grow closer and create the chemistry between the two actors on the show. "When you’re having to be that intimate with someone, barriers just come down because you’re having to trust that person, you’re having to feel very safe in their presence. And he was such a gentlemen and having just done 'Frankenstein' himself on stage, where he’d been butt naked, with Jonny Lee Miller… he was extremely sympathetic as well to the process," Lara told Access. "So I’d say we have a lovely chemistry and a lovely rapport and a relationship where we might not see each other for a few months and we get back together and it’s just like old friends."
Her character's profession necessitated that nude scene, a first for Pulver. "It was a closed set. I had on just shoes, earrings and lipstick," she says, at first self-conscious of her lack of clothes. "It was no mean feat for me to shoot for eight hours being naked. But then something goes on in your head that changed the whole dynamic," says Pulver, who realized, "'I'm naked, but I have all the power.' It's a device for her to gain control over the most intelligent man she's ever met. It was like a game of chess. Sherlock has never met his match in that way; there have always been other things preoccupying his brain. On the list of one to ten, sex has been at the bottom." Pulver prepared by shopping for corsets and whips and doing research, mostly online. "If anyone had got a hold of my computer the week before we started I would have been in prison," she laughs. "My future lovers will benefit for sure."
In the meantime, Pulver will play Clarice Orisni in Starz’s highly anticipated Da Vinci’s Demons this April. She is the devoted wife of Lorenzo Medici, the patron of Leonardo Da Vinci in the reimagination of the life of the famed artist and inventor. "She is a dutiful wife who is very pro-Florence, a shrewd politician and… she is the woman behind the throne," she said of her newest character, a sort of Renaissance-era Jackie Kennedy. "She is never going to undermine her husband, and yet you get these lovely nuggets in later episodes of just seeing them in their day to day lives and realize these two people care and love each other deeply, and she will do whatever she can to accommodate and allow for him to progress and to allow Florence and the family to flourish." With Leonardo (played by Brit Tom Riley) being driven, sometimes impulsively by his creativity and insatiable quest for knowledge, Lara’s Clarice will have to step in to quiet the wild genius. "We get a couple of moments where she almost trying to keep him in check. She has a mission and she has a vision, which conflicts slightly with his free thinking, ambitious, wayward mind and she just wants to keep him on track and she’ll use her femininity," Pulver said. "I think, actually, to a certain degree, she’s the most challenging character that he meets because he can’t use his natural charm with her because she’s a shrewd business woman."
Da Vinci’s Demons premieres April 12 on Starz
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