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." 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. Lynch worked closely on the character with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator of Fleabag, who was brought in by Craig to punch up the script. “When I told Phoebe who I wanted Nomi to be, it wasn’t a conversation,” says Lynch. “She just said, ‘That’s exactly what I thought, fab, OK, let’s do it.’” 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. 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

Tilly: You've got to really adore your costar and have a good relationship and a trusting relationship because it's a really violent scene…[Gina] sprained her wrist or finger or something like that. But you got to go for broke. You can't be precious, you know? You're doing fight scenes. You kind of have to go for it. 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: Look at your body. Honestly, whenever I wasn't sure of what I was doing I would just stare at your chest. 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. 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. Besides being a genuinely considerate movie with some thoughtful meditations on religion and culture, it has the added thrill of having super erotic sex scenes, made possible because:

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 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. 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: 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!"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.”

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.

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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 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. 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. Tilly: We had to reshoot the last scene too because, when they were driving away, you could see palm trees reflected in the windshield. Tilly: I never met her. She was pretty much advising Gina. And the thing is, Gina's character is a lot more hardcore lesbian than Violet.