Let’s get the next one out before we get the next one out

Picture: Michael Kovac/Getty Images

To another pet topic: James Bond. We haven’t even got our peepers on the much-delayed No Time To Die, Daniel Craig’s final outing as 007, without the rumour mill grinding away over who will be his replacement. This week's outbreak has been prompted by online reports Tom Hardy has landed the gig, claims so convincing that, apparently, betting has been suspended on all other candidates. There’s no confirmation or denial from anyone actually in the know, of course, but you'd also hope that the subject wouldn't even be on the table until No Time To Die actually hits screens in November ( assuming Boris - that’s the prime minister, not some Spectre supervillain - doesn’t have other ideas). 

Be that as it may, the resurrection of speculation about Hardy - a longtime resident of the list of potential 007s - has instigated more debate about the optimum age a Bond actor should be. Hardy is currently 43, and if he won the role, would be the oldest new James Bond since Roger Moore was cast in Live And Let Die aged 46. Moore would make his final outing as Bond in A View To A Kill at the age of 58 (not far off retirement age for a British civil servant), and his love scene with the-then 30-year-old Tanya Roberts was somewhat icky. 

There is, though, no formal recipe for what makes a Bond. In Ian Fleming’s books, the character was in his mid-to-late 30s, a little older than Sean Connery when he was cast in Dr. No, and older still than George Lazenby when cast in On Her Majesty's Secret Service at 29. Daniel Craig, was 38 when Casino Royale came out, and has without doubt redefined the character for the cinema. So, when Eon Productions do come to cast 'Bond 26' - and if Hardy is the man for the job - they’ll be contending with an actor who'll be, probably by the time the film comes out, in his mid-40s. Not that it should be an issue: with roles in films like Mad Max, The Revenant and The Dark Knight (as well as Layer Cake with Craig), Hardy has built up a repertoire of playing solid, physical characters, which would continue the trend set by Craig’s more muscular Bond (as opposed to Pierce Brosnan, his predecessor, who took the character back to the suave, less brooding, days of Moore, though thankfully with well-cut Brioni suits, rather than those awful safari jackets and flares).

Despite Hardy being installed as the nailed-on favourite to next play Bond, there is still no shortage of other names being talked of, with posh boys James Norton and Tom Hiddleston (largely the result of playing a Bondesque character in The Night Manager), Bodyguard’s Richard Madden, Michael Fassbender and even Idris Elba in the frame (despite now being 48). 30-year-old Jack Lowden from Dunkirk appears to be the youngest name mentioned. However, this is speculative, and pointless speculation at that. Plus, we shouldn’t get too carried away, even if Hardy’s name refuses to go away. 

The week's news flurry was the result of a post on a fairly obscure blog, The Vulcan Reporter, which, as its name might suggest, has history as a portal for Star Trek stuff. Quite what authority it has, then, to make the claim about a new Bond being cast by the normally militarily tight-lipped Eon is not known. Even if The Vulcan Reporter has taken a complete punt - one, by the way, that every newspaper in Christendom has reported on - it isn’t a bad shout. Hardy has, somewhat like Daniel Craig, been able to quietly move between parts throughout his career without establishing one that would prejudice the audience's view of him as a Bond. Roger Moore, of course, had already played Simon Templar - not a million miles from 007 - in The Saint on TV before he made Live And Let Die. Hardy has played both heroes and villains, including both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in Legend, as well as Al Capone.

Would an even more rugged Bond work for these times? When Casino Royale appeared, The Bourne Identity had beaten Bond to it by four years, redefining the spy-based action thriller for the new Millennium. While Casino didn’t need to replicate Bourne, there was certainly an amping up of action sequences to match him. The opening parcour chase in Madagascar threw down a marker at an instance that Bond would not take his new cinematic rival lying down. Hardy certainly could compete with the physical aspects of maintaining the Craig Bond’s exhausting action sequences, as the No Time To Die trailers have emphatically previewed. Plus, any actor needing a north star here need only look at Tom Cruise, still doing his own stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise (something I bore witness to one frosty January morning in 2018 when my girlfriend and I were walking to the Tate Modern and just happened to see Cruise sprinting across Blackfriars Bridge while being filmed for M:I6).

The big question, though, is whether Hardy can do suave. Again, Craig nailed this 007 characteristic against expectation (as did the criminally underrated Timothy Dalton, who played a fine Bond in The Living Daylights and Licence To Kill). This, though, is harder to gauge: Hardy’s history of characters has not pandered to any one class of character, but this may be to his advantage. 

There’s nothing in the script that says that, just because Bond knows his claret from his Beaujolais, the actor playing him should do, too. After all, Sean Connery was a former milkman of a working class Edinburgh background. And, almost 60 years since Dr. No, his shadow - justifiably - still hangs over the role. And, I suspect, always will.

Anyway, before we get too carried away over Tom Hardy or anyone else playing Bond in a presumed 26th film, some time in hopefully the near future, we really must get the current James Bond out in front of the world. No Time To Die should have had its premiere in April, but COVID-19 did its best, and even 007 - who has, in the past, overcome the most dastardly plots to threaten the world - was pushed back to November. So, maybe, let’s focus on getting the next Bond film out, before we start talking about the next James Bond, eh?