Holding out for a villain, not a hero (yet)

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With a very real sociopathic lunatic threatening civilisation with very real nuclear annihilation, it's probably the wrong time to think about who 007 might be up against in the as-yet unnamed 26th ‘official’ James Bond film that Eon Productions is expected to start pre-production work on sometime soon. But that’s not stopping producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson thinking about who the baddie will be in ‘Bond 26’, as it is currently known.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter last week during a presentation dinner, at which Broccoli and her half-brother received the 2022 Pioneer Award from the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation, Broccoli said that they always consider what challenge Bond should face before anything else. “We always sit down with our writers, and we start by thinking about ‘What is the world afraid of?’,” she revealed. “We start by thinking about, ‘Who’s the Bond villain?’. We try to focus on that as the sort of uber story, and then we want to also look at Bond’s emotional life, and what he’ll be facing personally that he hasn’t had to deal with before. So he has two big issues in the films — one is the geopolitical one and the other is the personal one.

Wilson hinted that even the most up-to-date global dramas could be reflected in Bond 26. “Everyone thought that when the Berlin Wall came down it was all hunky dory [in the world] and there would be no stories to tell anymore. Well, that proved wrong. The world is so unpredictable and it’s a rich environment for storytelling.”

That won’t be the only response to change: with the death of the Queen, Bond will next be working for His Majesty’s Secret Service. “Bond worked for queen and country, and will now be working for king and country,” Broccoli told the Hollywood Reporter. “He was a very loyal servant of the British government. He’s a classical hero that cares about the world and cares about humanity more than his own personal desires. It’s a very sad time in Britain, obviously, it’s a big time of transition, but she certainly has left a very extraordinary legacy.”

Daniel Craig, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson and Michelle Yeoh at the 2022 Will Rogers Pioneer of the Year Dinner

Speaking of transition, there is still the small matter of who will play Bond next. “When we get to a point, like we are now, we have to think about the trajectory of the Bond films and the storylines and where we want to take them,” Broccoli explained. “So, that’s really the main focus at the beginning. Once we have a sense of where we want to go, then we’ll start thinking about casting.”

Broccoli and Wilson recently spoke to Variety and revealed the scale of arguably cinema’s most auspicious casting decision. “It’s not just about casting an actor for a film,” Broccoli said. “It’s about a reinvention, and ‘Where are we taking it? What do we want to do with the character? And then, once we figure that out, who’s the right person for that particular reinvention?”

Broccoli explained that when they first spoke to Daniel Craig about the role, the actor had to come to terms with the length of service he’d be expected to commit to, not to mention how much it would turn his life upside down for, then, a relatively unknown actor. “It’s not just showing up for a couple of months of filming,” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “When we cast Bond, it’s a 10 to 12-year commitment. So any actor is probably thinking, ‘Do I really want that thing?’.”

The vexed question, however, for many Bond fans is what Eon will do with Bond next time out, given that No Time To Die brought Craig’s reign to an end with [sort of spoiler alert] 007 facing certain oblivion as Royal Navy cruise missiles rained down on Lyutsifer Safin’s bio weapon-infected island. Fan forums have called for the producers to make Bond much younger, even younger than the character was in Craig’s debut, Casino Royale, which suggested that it was the start of his ‘double-O’ status. 

As the conclusion of Craig’s five-film arc, No Time To Die represented the evolution of the character, from the “sexist, mysogynist dinosaur” Judi Dench’s M branded Bond in Pierce Brosnan’s Goldeneye, to a significantly more emotional Bond. “The films over his tenure were the first time we really connected the emotional arc,” Broccoli says. The character will inevitably evolve even further with the choice of the next actor to play 007 - to which the producers remain quite open-minded. Broccoli and Wilson have hinted, though, that the notion of a women playing Bond has been quietly nixed. 

With the likes of Idris Elba, Henry Cavill and Toms Hardy, Hiddleston and Holland appearing to rule themselves out, press speculation has turned to actors like Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page, Henry Golding, Micheal Ward and Thomas Doherty, the latter three relatively unknown, as Craig was. By the time casting actually takes place, there will no doubt be plenty more permutations. I just know it won’t be me.

With the 60th anniversary next week of Bond’s cinematic debut in Dr. No, on 5 October 1962, and Mad Vlad in the Kremlin threatening armageddon, consciousness of fiction’s most famous superhero remains high. Who knows what sort of world Bond 26 will arrive in, as Broccoli and Wilson have said that could be another two years before the film hits screens, and there’s a long way to go before then. The first job will be identifying its villain and the fiendish plot he or she will require 007 to foil. Given the state of the world right now, it would be fair to say that there’s a rich field of possibilities to take inspiration from.