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. 

You know my name: Bond, James Bond

I may be speaking from an extremely partisan position, but for my entire lifetime - and certainly my culturally-aware lifetime - there has never been anything in cinema quite like James Bond. Even giving a pass to the weaker entries in the now-25-strong ‘official’ series (and you’ll have to read my post from earlier this week to see how the first 24 stack up), the films have, for 59 years, provided a scale and scope of escapism that many rivals have attempted to surpass, but none ever have. No wonder the cinema industry has been hanging on to the opening of No Time To Die with grim determination - and relief that, finally, the film is being released.

This is, after all, Hollywood’s longest-running franchise (anything featuring Godzilla or Sherlock Holmes not withstanding), in an era when bankable repeat business driven by definitive movie brands is what keeps the multiplexes going. To date, the series launched by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman in 1962 with Dr. No has earned a collective $16.3 billion in global ticket sales, according to a calculation by Forbes in 2018. That stat alone underlines just what the almost two-year delay to No Time To Die means to the film industry. As it is, MGM and Eon Productions, the company Broccoli and Saltzman founded in 1961, have spent $250 million making the film (the highest budget ever for a Bond production) and $66 million on promoting it, though no doubt the myriad product placement deals - from the usual watch and car brands to, bizarrely, a limited edition pair of Adidas trainers - will have offset some of that cost.

Nevertheless, while 007 has endured plenty of save-the-world scrapes in his time, the stakes couldn’t be higher for an industry deadened by the global pandemic. Yes, there have been other priorities and, yes, there’s been television and a tsunami of everyone-has-a-favourite streaming recommendations, but there is nothing - repeat, nothing - like the big screen experience. And there is nothing like a new Bond film to experience it through. What the series might lack in Oscar-worthy artistic integrity it more than makes up for in areas that popcorn-munching paying punters actually enjoy, namely a stupidly good time, with the right cocktail of action, confected glamour, a little bit of knowing humour, and a window opened on the world though spectacular locations. Which is why the arrival, at last, of No Time To Die fills me with both unbridled excitement and just a little worry.

The worry comes from the obvious: is it any good? Ever since the ‘Bond 25’ project was announced in 2016, a year after Spectre appeared, expectation has mounted. Of course it did. It always does. The first issue was whether Daniel Craig, who had rebooted Bond when receiving his double-o status with 2006’s Casino Royale, would return. He’d been quoted saying, rashly, that he’d “rather slash his wrists” than play 007 again, but in fairness, he was asked the question not long after Spectre had wrapped. As he has subsequently said in interviews, it was like asking a marathon runner if they’d run another just after passing the finishing line on the first. 

However, getting Craig to sign on for a fifth outing turned out to be the easiest challenge for Bond 25 to surmount: first, Danny Boyle, who was brought in to replace the equally auteurist Sam Mendes (who’d directed Craig's third and fourth, Skyfall and Spectre), walked away amid “creative differences” (allegedly trying to change Bond too much). In came Cary Fukunaga, a relatively unknown director in the genre, but whose work on TV series like True Detective had marked him out as an innovator. In, too, came Phoebe Waller-Bridge at Daniel Craig’s behest, to add a little of her own magic to a script already written by longtime Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. All of this further pushed back a release date of what was, for certain, Craig’s final Bond film. But then a global calamity as deadly as 007 had ever faced down forced the opening of No Time To Die to be rescheduled not once, not twice, but three times. 

Now, almost two years after it was supposed to be on our cinema screens, it’s here. Expectation levels are off the charts. Enticingly, the producers have been feeding us delicious scraps of No Time To Die through trailers. From these we’ve pieced together that Craig is joined for a second time by Léa Seydoux as love interest Madeleine Swann, that Christoph Waltz returns, cryptically, as perennial nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and there is the usual supporting gang of M (Ralph Fiennes), Miss. Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw). And we know that principal villain this time is Remi Malik as Lyutsifer Safin, while Lashana Lynch has kept people guessing as to whether she’s being teed up to play a female Bond (she’s not) as the fellow 00, Nomi. There are gadgets, car chases and shootouts, obviously.

For subscribers to the Bond mythology, No Time To Die also, we’re promised, resolves an arc commenced by Casino Royale. That film wasn’t just a reset of the character’s “sexist, misogynist, dinosaur” ways, as Judi Dench’s M accused Brosnan’s Bond of in GoldenEye, but the introduction of themes that made the character decidedly more vulnerable, emotional even. It wasn’t, however, the dramatic reboot some seem to think it was. But in everything from the cinematography to the characterisations, the Daniel Craig Bond films have marked a tonal shift from the cartoon-like self parody they were, at one stage, in danger of becoming. The Bond producers have acknowledged that 007 had to reflect a post-9/11 reality, in which spies didn’t drink vodka-martinis and drive exotic (and highly conspicuous) sports cars, but actually operated in the shadows, cyphers for governments with a genuine need for secret agents to be just that, secret. This was key to the critical and commercial success of the Jason Bourne films, which redefined the spy-action genre as more dystopian than Bond’s encounters with deranged super-villains. It was a realism that 007 had to shift towards to remain audience-credible.

We don’t, however, want Bond to be another Bourne. We want “Bond, James Bond” with all the Bond traditions, tropes and cliches. And, it would appear, we get plenty of that with No Time To Die. Now that it's opened I’ll spare you any plot spoilers if you’re planning to go and see it in the coming days, but we do already know that it centres around Bond being forced out of retirement after his CIA friend Felix tells him about the kidnap of scientist by the sinister Safin who has seriously dangerous intentions for the world. As they usually do. You’re welcome, of course, to read any of the first reviews that have appeared since Tuesday night’s premiere.

The one hope, going into No Time To Die’s general opening today in the UK, is that it will break the supposed curse of Last Bond Appearance Syndrome. This is the slightly flimsy supposition that the five Bond actors until Craig have all made final appearances in underwhelming 007 outings. I’d dispute that assessment for Sean Connery (Diamonds Are Forever - No.5 on my ranking, posted earlier this week), and George Lazenby only made the one film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which was pretty good (No.7), but it is true that with Roger Moore’s A View To A Kill, Timothy Dalton’s Licence To Kill, and Pierce Brosnan’s Die Another Day, their tenures ended disappointingly. The Den Of Geek website correctly pointed out that No Time To Die brings an end to Craig’s time as Bond after a largely acclaimed run of films, with directors Martin Campbell, Marc Foster and Sam Mendes (twice) taking the franchise into new territory, character and narrative-wise. And now it is Fukunaga who has been given the keys to cinema's most famous and enduring screen property.

Daniel Craig has undoubtedly moved the needle as far as Bond goes, in his 15 years in the role - itself a landmark, albeit one determined by the circumstance of the extended gap between Spectre and now. He caused shock and even denial when first cast for being blond and of a somewhat stockier physical stature than the image first cast by Sean Connery in Dr. No (to the extent that the CraigNotBond movement emerged online amongst those with clearly too much time on their hands). Now it would be hard to imagine anyone else. “I’m in total denial,” co-producer Barbara Broccoli - Cubby's daughter - recently told Variety of the end of the Craig era. “I’ve accepted what Daniel has said, but I’m still in denial. It’s too traumatic for me.” 

It is certainly going to be strange: I grew up in the era of Roger Moore, and accepted the transition to Timothy Dalton and then Pierce Brosnan, but the Daniel Craig films have reinvigorated my love of the entire franchise. This, then, raises the stakes of how Broccoli and her step-brother Michael G. Wilson go about a potential Bond 26. Casting the lead will be the first challenge, given that the media has, since Craig first suggested his time was over, been tripping over themselves with names, from Idris Elba, Tom Hardy and Henry Cavill to Richard Madden, James Norton and, most recently, Bridgerton’s Rege-Jean Page all tipped to replace him. Even Lynch has been suggested as the first female Bond, purely for playing the double-0 Nomi in No Time To Die. However, Broccoli insists that the process to find the next James Bond has not started yet. “Oh, God no. We’re not thinking about it at all,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. “We want Daniel to have his time of celebration. Next year we’ll start thinking about the future.” “He’s been such a great Bond,” Wilson added. “Those are big shoes to fill.”

What is certain is that Bond, in Broccoli and Wilson’s eyes, wouldn’t necessarily have to be white and dark-haired in the Connery image. “You think of him as being from Britain or the Commonwealth, but Britain is a very diverse place,” Wilson said to Variety, with his step-sister underlining the seriousness with which they regard the key process of finding their next Bond first, before a 26th film commences development. “For better or worse, we are the custodians of this character. We take that responsibility seriously,” Broccoli said. “He can be of any color,” she added, but stressed the following point: “but he is male. I believe we should be creating new characters for women - strong female characters. I’m not particularly interested in taking a male character and having a woman play it. I think women are far more interesting than that.”

That, in itself, is a key statement, given that political attitudes have shifted with the #MeToo movement. “Bond’s been evolving along with all the other men in the world,” Broccoli told Variety, and to some extent that’s true. In Vesper Lynd and Madeline Swann, Craig’s Bond has been virtually monogamous. That doesn’t mean to say that glamorous women don’t still play a part in 007's lifestyle, but there has been a shift - arguably begun during the Brosnan era - towards less simpering female characters serving more than just lazy eye candy and perpetuating that horrendously anachronistic tabloid term ‘Bond girls’.

The other assurance the Bond team have given is that 007 will remain a cinema proposition. Despite fears (and, surely, the studio’s temptation) that COVID-19 would lead to No Time To Die being released on streaming platforms first, even the acquisition of Eon’s production partner MGM by Amazon has brought pledges by all parties that Bond will remain a big screen attraction first and foremost. Or at least for now. “We make these films for the audiences,” Broccoli has said. “We like to think that they’re going to be seen primarily on the big screen. But having said that, we have to look to the future. Our fans are the ones who dictate how they want to consume their entertainment. I don’t think we can rule anything out, because it’s the audience that will make those decisions. Not us.”

The Amazon buyout has accelerated the discussion. In July, Wilson and Broccoli issued a statement to The New York Times for a piece about MGM bosses Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy in which they referred to “the continuing success” of the Bond films as being at a “critical juncture”, with its future “dependent on us getting the next iteration right”. They looked to De Luca and Abdy to be allowed to run the studio “unencumbered”, a possibly veiled remark about Amazon as a streaming giant. In the immediate term, fears about parental meddling would be unfounded, especially given that the acquisition is yet to pass regulatory approval, but also, Amazon didn’t acquire the Bond franchise outright, as it is a partnership between MGM and Eon. But still, the spectre, so to speak, of Bond being developed as some sort of television spinoff rarely disappears from view. “I think we’re in denial!” Wilson quipped to Total Film during a conversation about the franchise’s future, and the possibility of 007 appearing in a TV series. “We make films. We make films for the cinema. That’s what we do,” They had resisted the temptation of television “for 60 years”.

Clearly, though, the expectation and excitement generated by the prolonged release of No Time To Die, coupled with the critical and public success it is now generating, will only accelerate the need for Wilson and Broccoli to sit down, soon, and decide where they take their Bond custody next’. “It’s tough to think about the future until this film [No Time To Die] has its moment,” Broccoli told Total Film. “I think we just really want to celebrate this and celebrate Daniel, and then when the dust settles, look at the landscape and figure out what the future is. Although I think one thing we’ve certainly learned in the last 18 months is you never know what the future is.” One thing’s for certain: “James Bond will return”.

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?

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…