James Bond will return…as a thirtysomething

Picture: Columbia Pictures

And, so, we’re back to that again: who will be next to play James Bond on screen. Ever since Daniel Craig bowed out in No Time To Die, barely a month has gone by without the press running with one rumour or another. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, James Norton, Henry Cavill, Idris Elba, Regé-Jean Page and Jack Lowden, and many, many others have been, apparently, in the frame. One or two are even believed to have been actively auditioning. The cold hard truth, however, is that, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, probably, outside of producers Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson no one knows exactly where things stand.

Actually, there is one other person: Debbie McWilliams, who has been the Bond franchise’s casting director since 1981. “There’s no conversation being had at the moment,” she revealed to the Radio Times this week, pointing out that Broccoli has been busy with other projects (including the decidedly un-Bondlike films Ear For Eye and Till). That No Time To Die was released in 2021 (and then delayed by more than a year due to the pandemic), and no new Bond film has been put into production is, says McWilliams, nothing to be concerned about. 

“You know, it’s not unusual for there to be quite a big gap between different Bonds, it has been known to have a five-year gap. So, no, nothing.” That notwithstanding, the longer the gap, the greater the hunger for the press to fill it. “When there’s a gap in a newspaper, they fill it with a James Bond story, because they haven't got anything else to write about,” McWilliams said. “Why people can’t just wait and see, I don’t know.”

She is, of course, being cute. I may be biased, but she will surely know that the role of 007 is the most talked about in cinema. And while the press might - as they will do - simplify the process into who they think ‘looks’ like a Bond (or, simply, who they like), the actual process is far from straightforward.

Some fans have suggested that the next Bond could be a younger version, as other franchises like Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Montalbano, Indiana Jones and Star Wars’ Han Solo have done - even younger than Craig’s Bond in Casino Royale. “We’ve tried looking at younger [actors] in the past,” Wilson has said, “but trying to visualise it doesn’t work. Remember, Bond’s already a veteran. He’s had some experience. He’s a person who has been through the wars, so to speak. He’s probably been in the SAS or something. He isn’t some kid out of high school that you can bring in and start off. That’s why it works for a 30-something”.

Getting it right is fraught with challenge. “When Daniel was cast, I met hundreds of people and travelled here, there and everywhere,” McWilliams told the Radio Times. “Barbara Broccoli was the main advocate. She knew she wanted him pretty much from the beginning, but it was proving to everybody else which was the difficulty.” 

That, perhaps, draws reference to the fact that Craig didn’t look like any previous cinematic James Bond, the ideal that had been established by Sean Connery, more or less directly replicated by George Lazenby, and then followed - to varying degrees - by Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan. Craig was both blond and blue eyed, and not all that tall, either (a point made jokingly in the actor’s cameo as a Stormtrooper in Star Wars: The Force Awakens).

“When we started, it was a slightly different feel,” McWilliams said of the casting search that eventually led to Craig becoming 007. “We did look at a lot of younger actors, and I just don’t think they had the gravitas. They didn’t have the experience, they didn’t have the mental capacity to take it on, because it’s not just the part they’re taking on, it’s a massive responsibility.” Even when Craig was eventually cast, the decision encountered a hostile media: “It was unbelievably negative, I have to say,” McWilliams told Entertainment Weekly in another interview. “The press response was awful and I felt so sorry for him, but in a funny kind of a way I think it almost spurred him on to do his damndest to prove everybody wrong.”

This time around, McWilliams says there are no preconceived ideals as to who they cast. “There’s lots to be taken into consideration,” she says. “There isn't an absolute ideal mould. There never would be and never should be, because otherwise, it just becomes boring. It’s the best person for the job and one year it might be one person, one year somebody else – you can’t really predict.” It’s not, she says, “algebraic”. “It just doesn't work like that.” 

Picture: Unwind Media

That being said, an artificial intelligence app, DeepDream AI, recently created an image for gaming company Unwind Media of the perfect Bond, based on a brief Broccoli talked about last year of the actor being British, male, under 40 and over 5’10” tall. 

McWilliams suggests that Bond should look like “a regular guy”, adding that such a brief would rule out a Hollywood action star like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. “He has to have a great physique - it demands a high level of fitness - but he shouldn’t stand out in any situation.” That, then, might rule out Henry Cavill, long considered a leading contender, whose casting as Superman drew on his physique and chiselled appearance. Then again, Cavill wouldn’t look all that different to Timothy Dalton, whose portrayal of Bond - sadly curtailed by contractual wrangles to just the two outings - is considered by many to be the most definitive interpretation of the Fleming creation.

“The gift of casting a James Bond film is you don’t need to cast a well-known name,” McWilliams concluded in the Radio Times. While Moore and Brosnan were well known from television when they became Bond, Connery, Lazenby, Dalton and Craig were much less known. Many fans - including this one - would have loved to have seen Idris Elba in the role (not, by the way, for any culture-war baiting reason, but simply because of his screen presence and that he has displayed shades of Bond in many of his past roles, like The Wire’s Stringer Bell and detective John Luther). The idea of a complete unknown to reboot the post-Craig 007 is not a bad idea, either.

According to McWilliams, they wanted to “give Bond a bit more of a menace” with Casino Royale, which is why they went with Craig as more of the “blunt instrument” Ian Fleming intended for the character with his novels. Craig had, says McWilliams, a bit more menace: “Let's face it, as good as Pierce was, he’s not a menace, whereas Daniel is. You feel a very strong presence in the room with him, and I think that that is incredibly important.”

Whoever Broccoli, Wilson and McWilliams go with for ‘Bond 26’, there will be one key hurdle for the actor to negotiate: the screen test. “It’s really just to see how that person looks on screen, and how they respond, and how they feel sitting in that chair,” McWilliams told the Radio Times. 

At a BFI event last year to celebrated the 60th anniversary of Dr. No’s release, Wilson revealed that they test all potential Bond actors by having them recreate one particular scene from From Russia With Love - arguably my favourite entry in the series - in which unwitting SPECTRE agent Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) attempts to seduce Sean Connery’s 007. 

The scene follows Bond’s killing of a KGB assassin and finds him returning to his hotel room to unwind, discovering Tatiana in bed waiting for him. “Anyone who can bring that scene off is right for Bond. It’s tough to do,” Wilson said, explaining that in that one sequence, Bond has to exude both sex appeal as well as invoke the Cold War without trivialising the latter or making the former too cheesy, something that lesser spy films and the various spoofs have usually done.

The world has, of course, moved on from the Cold War, but given the ratcheting up of geopolitical tensions since No Time To Die was released, Bond 26 will not only present a challenge in the casting, but also in the storyline it produces. Assuming they’ll be involved in the project, longstanding scriptwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade will have their work cut out. The suggestion from Broccoli and Wilson is that the script will be developed before casting decisions are made, including choosing their next James Bond. Casino Royale rebooted the series (following the questionable Die Another Day, Brosnan’s final outing) by starting at the beginning, with Bond earning his licence to kill, commencing a five-film arc that ended - avoiding any spoilers if you still haven’t seen No Time To Die - with a pretty conclusive outcome. To say the whiteboard is completely empty for the next Bond film, and therefore its lead actor, is an understatement. The expectations aren’t too modest, either. 

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

Picture: © Danjaq, LLC and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. 007, James Bond and related logos are trademarks of Danjaq, LLC.

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.

Bond will be back…eventually

Coming out of the shadows...at some point: Daniel Craig as James Bond

So Bond 25 is back on track, sort of. A month after Danny Boyle walked away from the project amid “creative differences” (supposedly, killing off Daniel Craig’s Bond to have the character regenerate, Doctor Who-style, as the next Bond, or something like that…), Bond supremos Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli - together with Craig - have this morning announced the appointment of up and coming director Cary Joji Fukunaga to helm the much delayed next instalment in the franchise.

While it’s good to know that Bond 25 has a director again, filming won’t commence until 4 March next year, with a worldwide release date of Valentine’s Day in 2020, according to the official tweet, thus breaking the recent production and release cycle of Bond films opening before Christmas.

While this is unlikely to affect audience interest, the delay in appointing Boyle’s replacement and, rumoured, significant rewrites on the script Boyle had favoured, which reportedly had a strong reflection of current global relations with Russia, will mean that it will be more than four years between the new outing and the last, Spectre.

With Daniel Craig already agitating to leave the role after the last film and its physical demands on him, the fact that today’s announcement is jointly from Craig, Wilson and Broccoli is somewhat significant. Craig will turn 50 just two days before filming begins at Pinewood - 31 years older than the youngest Bond on his opening day (George Lazenby).

41-year-old Fukunaga made his name as director of Season 1 of True Detective, brilliantly working with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as they investigated an occultist murder in the American Deep South. How that translates to James Bond will, obviously, remain to be seen. Plenty of Bond fans have hoped for a return to a director like Martin Campbell, the New Zealander in charge of Pierce Brosnan’s GoldenEye and Craig’s 007 debut, Casino Royale. Others - namely me - had hoped that Sam Mendes could have been persuaded to direct Craig one last time, after his triumphant work on Skyfall and the sadly under-appreciated Spectre.

Mendes was something of a gamble as a Bond director, being steeped in the theatre and with cerebral films like Road To Perdition and American Beauty to his name, rather than a back catalogue of action-adventures. But as he proved, with the Bond franchise having to adjust to competition from both the Mission: Impossible series and the darker Jason Bourne films, Mendes’ approach was perfect. And, with him stepping away after Spectre, he left the door open for a director of similar tone, Christopher Nolan. The mind only boggles as to what a Nolan-directed Bond would be like, if his Batman trilogy is anything to go by.

So, we wait with interest. 14 February, 2020 seems an awful long way away…

Your move, Mr. Bond

As friends and family will attest, I have a ridiculous affinity for pop trivia. This only worsens when I find myself in, or perilously close to, a location with a strong pop culture connection. For example, I once spent an afternoon in Los Angeles getting shots of street signs on Mulholland Avenue and Ventura Boulevard just to make a short video set to Tom Petty’s Freefallin’. Later in that same LA trip I risked arrest for 'doing a Hugh Grant' by driving repeatedly through the ‘No Cruise’ zone on Sunset Boulevard, purely - and obsessively - to get the perfect shot of the sun setting in order to match it to Steely Dan’s Hey Nineteen (which begins with the line: “Drive west on Sunset to the sea. Turn that jungle music down, just until you’re out of town”).

In the Seattle suburb of Renton - principle attraction, the factory that makes the Boeing 737 - I spent a wet Sunday morning trying to find Jimi Hendrix’s grave. When I did I was astonished to discover that, at the time (1998), there was nothing more to mark the final resting place of rock’s greatest guitarist than a slab with the outline of a Stratocaster on it and the inscription “James Marshall Hendrix - 1942-1970”. I'm pleased to report that since then the grave has been appropriately ‘upgraded’ with a gazebo that now draws in fans to pay proper respect.

More recently in Paris, on discovering I was living right across the road from an apartment which featured in a pivotal scene in The Bourne Identity, I launched a tour of other locations from the film, mostly to satisfy myself that they were as seen. I’d already set a precedent for such film-nerdishness when I first moved to Paris, realising that I was just around the corner from Avenue d’Eylau, which appears in Thunderball as the HQ of SPECTRE.

Here in Florida this week I am equally doused in film and television trivia, especially due to how much the state has appeared in the Bond films, most notably Licence To Kill and Daniel Craig’s first outing, Casino Royale. Which leads me neatly - if highly tenuously - on to the prospect of whether Craig himself will put in another appearance as 007.

“I'd rather slash my wrists than do another one,” was the somewhat nihilistic statement Craig gave Time Out last year when asked. Even taking a little actorly petulance into account, Craig was reacting to the fact he'd taken such a physical punishing making Spectre. Perhaps, at the time, the prospect of a fifth outing as Bond was too much. Cue a flurry of rumouring and theorising as to who could take over, with Tom Hiddleston instantly installed as lead favourite, purely, it should be noted, on the back of The Night Manager (and despite the fact he would be too fey and too posh). In the same frame came Idris Elba (a good shout, actually), the bloke off Poldark who takes his shirt off a lot, Tom Hardy and Damian Lewis, and sundry other himbos on the Equity register. There were even some creditable attempts by the likes of Gillian Anderson and Emilia Clark to throw their respective hats into the ring.

But, while a female Bond or a black Bond might make for interesting change of direction for the 54-year-old series, it would still be regarded as tampering with the DNA of the most longest-running and lucrative franchise in film history, something producers Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson have had little room to play about with. Whether they or anyone else likes it or not, the mould for the screen James Bond was set by Sean Connery, and Craig apart, the Bonds that have followed - George Lazenby, Roger Moore (to some degree...), Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, have been more or less the same type.


Craig, of course, was the “wrong” Bond, when he was announced: five-feet-ten-inches and blond. And, yet, he has revitalised the franchise. Some would even say that he has finally unlocked the hold Connery’s legacy had over the character. For those of us - and there are many - who found the final Brosnan outing, Die Another Day an overblown and, frankly, ridiculous mess of CGI and ludicrous plot devices, the Craig films have restored Bond to the gripping spy adventures that Connery established in the first place.

“I got the best job in the world doing Bond,” Craig said on Saturday at the New Yorker Festival, sporting blond hair for a new film which recalled Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love. “The things I get to do on a Bond movie, there’s no other job like it,” Craig said. “If I were to stop doing it I’d miss it terribly. I get a massive kick out of it. And if I can keep getting a kick out of it, I will.”

So, is this a change of heart? Well, for one thing, Craig is believed to be contracted to do a fifth Bond film, but such arrangements are never absolute. However, when challenged about his wrist-slitting remarks, Craig joked: “They say that shit sticks, and that definitely stuck,” adding that: “It was the day after filming [had ended on Spectre]. I'd been away from home for a year,” adding that the physical strains of one of film’s most physically demanding roles had taken its toll.” But, not wishing to appear ungrateful, said: “Boo-hoo. It's a good gig. I enjoy it.”

Even if his comments to Time Out were somewhat in the heat - or the pain - of the moment, his quip about “It would only be for the money” may have a ring of truth about it, being reportedly offered up to £120 million to play Bond again. Officially there are no plans for ‘Bond 25’, but given the way these films are made, don’t be surprised if, next month or in December EON productions calls a press conference at Pinewood Studios.

“A Bond movie is by the skin of your teeth,” Craig explained in New York on Saturday. “You get it shot and six months later it’s released. There’s no time for focus groups. You make the movie and then you put it out. It’s one of the most thrilling things as an actor you can do. It’s the way Barbara likes to shoot.”

Ultimately, Broccoli will make the decision on Craig being offered the role again, or whether they move on. “There’s this constant debate about who's going to be the next Bond,” Skyfall and Spectre director Sam Mendes has said recently. “The truth is – and here’s the headline: it’s not a democracy, it's not The X Factor, it's not the EU referendum, and it's not a public vote. Barbara Broccoli chooses who's going to be the next Bond: end of story.”

Craig himself has confessed to being ambivalent about who might take over the Walther PPK if he did decide not to do a fifth Bond film, but has also suggested that the calibre of replacement needs to be high. “You’ve got to step up. People do not make movies like this any more. This is really rare now. So don’t be shit.” One thing is certain, there’s little chance that Bond 25 won’t get made - this is Hollywood, after all, and if anything, the four Craig Bonds have revitalised the series. Anyone taking over now would be stepping in to a golden opportunity. And for Craig himself? He’s only 48. Roger Moore was 58 when he ‘retired’ from the role, although by then it had become preposterous. Craig clearly has a strong sense of his own ability to play he role. It would be nice to think he’s got one more in him.