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: This scene here it was all [advisor and feminist sex writer] Susie Bright's friends. That's why the bar scene is so authentic—it's all lesbians. In the office, nothing changed. Both of us swore not to tell anyone else. I dodged questions from friends about my relationship status like bullets - the lies were worth it for the delirium I felt when I was with her. 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."Gershon: There was one take that all four of us were like, "That's the one." It was like a real love scene. You didn't see a boob. You didn't see anything; it was all suggested. It really played on our face more than anything. Her husband reacted surprisingly well too, suggesting that they enrol in therapy to help both of them exit their long-standing relationship. I took this as my cue to make a commitment and said I would move to the suburbs to be with her and her three children, once her husband had moved out. Of course, if we’ve learned one thing about Bond, since the British secret agent made his film debut in Dr No in 1962, it’s that you don’t bet against him. Craig’s farewell will see him square off against the anarchist arch-villain Safin, played by Bohemian Rhapsody’s Oscar-winner Rami Malek. He’ll have some help from two Bond women – Bond “girls” being a thing of the past – in Ana de Armas and Lynch. The SOE’s leaders were readier than the old boys of MI5 and MI6, the foreign-intelligence agency, to grant that women enjoyed certain advantages. Many French men had been sent to labor camps in Germany, so women operatives were better able to blend in with a mostly female population. As Sarah Rose writes in D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II, a British captain who recruited three female SOE agents, Selwyn Jepson, believed that women were psychologically suited to behind-enemy-lines work—“secretive, accustomed to isolation, possessed of a ‘cool and lonely courage.’ ” Some officers thought women had greater empathy and caretaking instincts, which equipped them to recruit and support ordinary citizens as agents. Women were considered good couriers—a high-risk role—because they could rely on ingratiation and seeming naïveté as tools in tight spots. The war also provided openings for women to show that they could execute operations, making strategic life-and-death decisions.

Tilly: They wanted to do it in one long continuous shot. They had guys pulling at the walls. It was like a ballet between the Wachowskis, the crew, [and us]. [They'd be] yelling through the megaphone, "Breast!" and then we knew the breast was in frame. Tilly: Once they got the two of us in the room, I thought, "This is a girl that I can really see being in a relationship with."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 Observer

As a queer woman myself, I was mostly concerned that the two female characters ate a whole plate of spaghetti without brushing their teeth before commencing intercourse. Coming from a Jamaican family continues to be a touchstone for Lynch. “My house was strictly Jamaican,” she says. “I think spag bol was the most British we got in our house. Being Jamaican is… there’s an attitude and a swagger that comes with just being born into a Jamaican family. You know how to stand up for yourself. Pretty instantly, like out of the womb, you’re already taking charge.” What is required,” Knight wrote, “is a clever woman who can use her personal attractions wisely.” And there you have it—the conventional wisdom about women and spycraft. Intelligence officers had long presumed that women’s special assets for spying were limited to strategically deployed female abilities: batting eyelashes, soliciting pillow talk, and of course maintaining files and typing reports. Overseeing operations? Not so much. 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.” 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 was coming right off of Showgirls, and I was so ultra femme in that. [I cut] all my nails and my hair off, and I started boxing. I had been dancing for five months, so I was so floaty and I wanted to be in my body more like a boxer…Marlon Brando, Monty Clift, Robert Mitchum. I went to all those guys. There's a certain quietness. I wanted to be like all the guys I project [my ideas of heroism and masculinity] on to. Gershon: As soon as I met Jen, I thought, "Oh my God, all I have to do is watch her." She was so amusing and so fun. It's just so easy to watch her, like her butt and her legs. It made my job easy to kind of objectify her. We liked each other as soon as we met. 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!" In the latest episode of the Disney+ series Hawkeye, we got to meet a new member of the Lesbian Cop Club, Wendy Conrad. While she may be the latest queer character to be introduced into the MCU, she shares a long legacy with other lesbian cops in TV and movies.