Dr. Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux) is Daniel Craig's James Bond's equivalent of Octopussy (Maud Adams). Craig's wildly popular rebooted 007 saga is expected to come to its conclusion in No Time To Die, which is planned to release in November 2020. Meanwhile, Octopussy was Roger Moore's sixth and penultimate outing as James Bond, which was released in 1983. While Swann is a psychologist and Octopussy was an international jewel smuggler, the two Bond Girls nonetheless share a few notable similarities.
Introduced in 2015's Spectre, Madeleine Swann met James Bond when he sought her out at her isolated place of work, the Hoffler Klinik in the Austrian Alps. Bond was tracking the international crime syndicate, Spectre, which led him to his old enemy, Mr. White AKA The Pale King (Jesper Christensen), the former leader of Quantum, which was revealed to be an adjunct of Spectre. White was actually hiding in fear of Spectre and its ruthless head, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), and he committed suicide soon after dropping Bond a clue as to the location of Spectre's desert headquarters. That clue pointed 007 to Dr. Swann, White's daughter, who was also a target of Spectre. By the end of the film, Bond destroyed Spectre's base of operations and apprehended Blofeld, who was taken into custody by MI6. 007 then quit the British Secret Service and drove off into retirement with Swann, whom he'd fallen in love with. However, No Time To Die will reveal new secrets Madeleine kept from James, which places his life in danger and brings him back into action.
Madeleine's backstory bears some curious similarities to the origin of Octopussy, the titular villainess of Roger Moore's 1983 Bond adventure. 007 encountered Octopussy in India, where she was the leader of an all-female Octopus Cult who took her name from her father's favorite pet, the blue-ringed octopus. Octopussy was affiliated with an exiled Afghan prince-turned-criminal named Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan), who used Octopussy's traveling circus as a front to smuggle Faberge eggs to the Soviet Union. Though she led a life of crime, Octopussy was not actually evil and she eventually succumbed to her attraction to Bond, siding with 007 as he tried to stop Khan's plot to detonate a nuclear warhead at Octopussy's circus, which was being held in a U.S. airbase in West Germany. Bond and Octopussy's dalliance only lasted the length of the film, however, and 007 moved on to new conquests.
Both Madeleine and Octopussy made their life choices based on their relationship with their fathers. Since she was a child, Swann was aware that her father was a criminal associated with Spectre and she even met Blofeld in her youth. Although she hates guns, Madeleine learned how to use one fearing one day it would be necessary, but she purposely distanced herself from Mr. White and never spoke to him as an adult. Similarly, Octopussy - her real name is Octavia Charlotte Smythe - is the daughter of one of James Bond's enemies; Dexter Smythe was a British traitor exposed by Bond. However, 007 allowed Smythe to save face by committing suicide rather than be taken into custody. This act of mercy towards her father indebted Octopussy to Bond and helped facilitate their joining forces against Kamal Khan. Both Mr. White and Dexter Smythe killed themselves in front of 007, leaving their daughters to pick up the pieces, albeit in very different ways.
Furthermore, Maud Adams and Lea Seydoux are part of an exclusive club of Bond Girls since they both star in two James Bond films, whereas most of the other actresses who play Bond Girls only appear in one film. As such, Adams and Seydoux join Eunice Grayson, who played Sylvia Trench, Sean Connery's Bond's love interest in Dr. No and From Russia With Love. However, Adams portrayed two different Bond Girls in two 007 movies a decade apart; she played Andrea Anders in The Man With The Golden Gun. Like Grayson, Seydoux is the rare Bond Girl who played the same character in two successive Bond movies - but, unlike Octopussy, Madeleine Swann is the most important and impactful woman in James Bond's life since Vesper Lynd (Eva Green).
