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.
So it’s finally here: the 25th Bond film, No Time To Die, receives its premiere tonight, at long last, having been delayed three times since its original November 2019 release date, the result of original director Danny Boyle walking away from the project, Cary Fukunaga taking over, and then COVID-19 proving to be a greater adversary than any villain 007 has faced to date. Added to the weight of expectation is that it is decidedly Daniel Craig’s fifth and final appearance as James Bond, having somewhat reinvented the character (in my opinion at least) from the outset of his tenure, as the franchise took on the grittier Jason Bourne films and Tom Cruise’s ever-more audacious Mission: Impossible series at the box office.
Conventional wisdom has it that the best screen Bond was Sean Connery, but Craig’s run has arguably come closest, running ahead of Roger Moore’s playboy Bond, Timothy Dalton’s rugged Bond, Pierce Brosnan’s stockbroker Bond, and George Lazenby’s one-off (but highly creditable) Bond. However, beyond the individual portrayals of the vodka martini-guzzling secret agent - well, as secret as you can get in a three-grand Tom Ford suit - how do the 24 ‘official’ films so far in which he appears stack up?
Here, then, in reverse order is my ranking of each entry in the canon made by Eon Productions, the company set up in 1961 by producers Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to turn Ian Fleming’s literary creation into a six-decade cinematic institution:
24. Die Another Day (2002)
It didn’t take long for the James Bond film series to border on self parody, but then that was half the fun of it. They have always been formulaic, but also have balanced the occasional touch of campery with sterner drama. Die Another Day, however, had neither the drama or the subtlety of the vast majority of the series, veering dangerously - and unintentionally - close to Austin Powers’ silliness, what with giant lasers and invisible cars. A shame, really, as Pierce Brosnan had been a credible 007. But once the scriptwriters jumped shark with Pierce Brosnan’s final outing, all the good work he’d built up since GoldenEye evaporated. Not even Halle Berry’s swimsuit-clad emergence from azure Cuban waters did much for it. What came next - Daniel Craig’s debut in Casino Royale - was the reset the Bodly badly needed...
23. Moonraker (1979)
The second Bond film I actually went to a cinema to see at an age when I was probably as enamoured with it as any other entry in the series I’d hitherto mostly seen on television. 40-odd years on, however, its flaws are too obvious: while the title Moonraker was, in fact, one of the earliest Ian Fleming novels to be envisaged being turned into a film (by the author himself), by the time the Bond producers put it into use as the 11th episode in the franchise, it was turned into a frankly ludicrous story that ended in a Star Wars-style space shootout. This was the result of the misshapen belief that Bond suddenly had to compete with George Lucas’s then-box office-imperious space operas. Even the ageing Moore looked bemused by it all. For various economic and union reasons, production was moved from Bond’s traditional Pinewood home to Boulogne-Billancourt in south-west Paris. When I worked there, my office overlooked the main sound stage’s distinctive shape, into which you could see how the interior of villain Hugo Drax’s Earth-threatening space station was built into it. Still the most memorable part of the film,
22. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Speaking of zeitgeist-bating villains, Jonathan Pryce’s hammy turn as a thinly-disguised Murdoch-clone media baron was a prime example of the Bond scriptwriters attempting some topicality. But instead of making an interesting - for Bond at least - statement about media power, we ended up with something that you didn’t have to work in the media to see right through as implausible and corny, though the brief scenes of a Hamburg hotel I’ve stayed in myself were something of a saving grace. Pierce Brosnan, too, plays Bond to steely effect, and while the Bondisms are well within the traditions of the canon, Tomorrow Never Dies trades too much on a somewhat dry plot with a quasi-political message that doesn’t properly land…or needed to be said in the first place.
21. A View To A Kill (1985)
Look, I’m not bashing Roger Moore. Like ranking your favourite Doctor Who according to the one you grew up with, as a child of the 1970s (I was born in 1967) you should say that Moore was ‘my’ Bond. The problem is that by 1985, Moore was 58 and the notion of Bond being a virile thirtysomething was getting stretched to the detriment of the film. Not that it doesn’t have its moments (well, they all do), and in the always entertaining Christopher Walken and Grace Jones, AVTAK had some engaging villainy to challenge 007, not to mention the prescient application of Silicon Valley as the film’s ultimate location, before the tech industry was anywhere near the omnipresence it has now. But, still.
20. The World Is Not Enough (1999)
With the exception of a genre-honouring theme song by Sheryl Crow, Pierce Brosnan, again, was poorly served by both plot and script on his third 007 outing. Like all of them, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not bad, but the weaknesses stand out over better entries in the series, not least of which a second and fairly pointless appearance by Robbie Coltrane, and Denise Richards’ turn as Dr Christmas Jones, which took Bond girl vacuousness to a new low. Robert Carlyle does a reasonably effective job as the KGB agent-turned-terrorist Renard, while Sophie Marceau adds a classy touch as the oil heiress who proves more than a match for Bond. But, again, like its predecessor, The World Is Not Enough tries too hard to make a point, rather than deliver on expectations of a Bond film.
19. Octopussy (1983)
A 19th place for Roger Moore’s sixth Bond film might seem harsh as it’s not bad. There’s just something about it that doesn’t quite put it in the series’ upper echelons. It is a John Glen-directed film, which is usually a decent benchmark for the Bond canon, but the film is probably undermined by its weak script and Moore playing 007 a little too casually, even for his breezy application of the role. There is plenty of decent action, of course, which from a cinema point of view would have made it a good night out in 1983, but Octopussy, as the unlucky 13th entry in the series, started to make the whole franchise look tired.
18. Licence To Kill (1989)
Like George Lazenby’s single appearance as 007, Timothy Dalton’s brace of Bond films never really gave the classically-trained Welshman the chance to prove his metal in the role. Clearly he had something of a tough act to follow in replacing Roger Moore after his seven turns, but for reasons best known to the producers, Dalton’s sophomore appearance - even with that man John Glen again - took too much influence from television action series than the adverntures of Britain’s pre-eminent superspy. Aerial scenes over the Florida Keys were admittedly impressive, but the storyline of Her Majesty’s leading secret agent taking on Robert Davi’s Central Casting drug kingpin Sanchez came across more Miami Vice than vintage Bond. Even cop show character stalwarts like Anthony Zerbe in the mix gave it more of a television scale rather than big screen Bond. A 15 certificate for its earthier scenes didn’t help with box office returns, either. Dalton would leave the role there, as the series came to a jarring halt due to legal disputes.
17. The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)
On many levels, this should be much higher in the rankings. After Moore’s stylish debut in Live And LetDie, the Bond producers gathered together a solid cast, led by Christopher Lee (a cousin of Ian Fleming) as the plummy-voiced, three-nippled titular assassin Francisco Scaramanga, Fantasy Island’s Hervé Villechaise as his impish manservant Nick Nack, and Britt Ekland at the height of her Britt Eklandness as the appallingly lightweight Miss Goodnight, but with the exception of a few genuinely impressive set-pieces (including Scaramanga’s flying AMC Hornet car, there was a tendency towards too much 1970s hipness, and even a little of the era’s psychedelia (in the showdown between Bond and Scaramanga) rather than the all-out action gags that the Bond films had established for themselves during the Sean Connery era.
16. For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Frankly, this should have been the Bond film made instead of Moonraker, so it was no surprise that 007 was restored to a more traditional outing for this first film of the 1980s, and the last made by United Artists before it was taken over by MGM. More importantly, after the sci-fi nonsense of Moonraker, Moore was given a better platform with which to portray his version of Suave Bond that, arguably, he did better than any of the other six actors in the franchise. Again with John Glen at the helm, Moore stands out amid a less starry cast, and a less trivial storyline, to the film’s benefit. It’s not at the top of the Bond game, but what it lacks in wit it makes up for in action which was finely tuned. Still, though, as with its follow-up, Octopussy, questions were already being asked about the series’ longevity, as the formula was starting to creak a little.
15. Quantum Of Solace (2008)
Frankly, I’ve wrestled with this ranking of Daniel Craig’s second Bond film. Because, as I think you’ll gather by the end of this post, I’ve been a huge fan of Craig as 007 and, equally, have loved what the three directors (in terms of films released to date) have done with him. Quantum was very much a postscript to the rebooting Casino Royale, rather than its sequel, which was a little bit of a shame. Even Craig has admitted that it "wasn’t quite what it should have been", but in mitigation, producer Barbara Broccoli has cited a Hollywood writers’ strike, and also the prospect of an actor’s walkout as a debilitation on Quantum’s development. Nevertheless, the opening sequence car chase through Italy, with Bond at the wheel of a modern Aston Martin being shot at by Quantum hitmen, was truly breathtaking, as were the rooftop scenes in Siena after Mr. White’s double-agent had shot their way out of MI6’s clutches - all skilfully arranged by director Marc Foster. Mathieu Amalric’s Dominic Greene took a new twist on the traditionally cat-stroking Bond baddie, but there was an unsatisfying dryness to the outcome of the film, not to mention a shorter length than most others in the series. Still, it’s not bad and, if I was in a more generous mood, would have placed it higher than 15th.
14. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
On artistic merit alone, Quantum Of Solace should indeed be higher than this, a film released almost 30 years beforehand. The Spy Who Loved Me, however, became the reference point for Bond films past, present and future, as well as being the one where it all fell into place for Roger Moore in his third appearance. While being somewhat reminiscent of You Only Live Twice (instead of satellites being gobbled up in space we had nuclear submarines captured at sea), veteran director Lewis Gilbert orchestrated arguably the coolest opening sequence ever committed to a Bond film - or, indeed, any film ever - with 007 chased down a ski slope by KGB agents until he flies off a cliff to be saved by a Union Flag-themed parachute opening with audacious flourish. We also dipped back into the Cold War, albeit with signs of Anglo-Soviet detente in the form of Barbara Bach, and Q Branch coming up with its best gadget since the Aston Martin DB5 - a Lotus Esprit that becomes a rocket-firing submarine. In Curt Jürgens, as the web-handed eco-villain Stromberg, you had another memorable baddie, accompanied by Richard Kiel’s van roof-chomping Jaws. Throw in some stunning Sardinian scenery and you have a Bond film - my first at the cinema - that remains memorable to this day. Better entries have been made - this is still 14th - but already we’re into the part of this ranking where it’s like choosing a favourite child in a very large brood of offspring.
13. The Living Daylights (1987)
With Timothy Dalton, 007, lost the arch camp that had increasingly accompanied Roger Moore as he grew older (and the Bond films become more like Carry On Spying), and instead introduced an intensity that returned the character to Sean Connery’s darker moments. The Living Daylights, too, applied an intelligent approach to Cold War politics without becoming too seriousness (the obligatory ski chase involving Dalton and Maryam d'Abo sliding down a mountain in a cello case is a classic), although it moved through familiar east European settings with vintage spy film style, before ending - very presciently - in Soviet invasion-era Afghanistan - and an absolutely brilliant climax involving Bond battling a baddie and a ticking bomb at the back of a Hercules over the Khyber Pass. A Bond masterclass from the Bond veteran director John Glen.
12. GoldenEye (1995)
After the lengthy legal wrangling that also saw Timothy Dalton resign his licence to kill, the Broccoli family finally got their man. Pierce Brosnan had been earmarked for Bond by Cubby Broccoli ever since they’d met on the set of For Your Eyes Only, but contractual obligations to the TV series Remington Steele had kept the smooth Irishman at arms length until the middle of cinema Bond’s fourth decade. Broccoli’s patience was richly rewarded, with Brosnan combining the eye-twinkling charm of Roger Moore with a degree of the sophistication that Sean Connery had beneath that sturdy Glaswegian exterior, two factors that, to be honest had been missing from Dalton’s colder interpretation of the character. There was much to like about GoldenEye, which is easily Brosnan’s best in the series. It felt modern, and moved the character on satisfactorily, introducing Judi Dench as the first female M, whose introduction to her star agent is to call him “a sexist, mysognist dinosaur”, giving the Bond franchise a healthy kick in the pants in the process (while also acknowledging the contemporary dismantling of the Soviet Union). Martin Campbell’s direction was crisp, with little wasted in terms of the plot or the set pieces. Welcome back, Mr. Bond.
11. Dr No (1962)
The one that started it all. The one that gave us “Bond, James Bond.” Shortly before Dr. No appeared in cinemas, Darryl F. Zanuck’s D-Day epic The Longest Day appeared, setting the trend for the next couple of decades of grandiose film-making involving as many star names as you could cram on to a billboard (John Wayne, Kenneth More, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, Peter Lawford, Rod Steiger, Kurt Jürgens, George Segal, Robert Wagner and Paul Anka amongst them. Indeed, such was the number of superstars in the three-hour black-and-white marathon that some made only virtual cameos. Amongst the line-up was a former milkman and amateur bodybuilder from Edinburgh, playing a lowly conscript in the Normany landings. The Longest Day would become the highest-grossing film of 1962. Two weeks after its release, Dr. No was released, heralding the start of the most enduring - and lucrative - franchise in film history. For this, alone, it deserves prominence in the 007 rankings. While it didn’t contain any of the gadgets and visual gags that would become the stock-in-trade of both Bond and its numerous parodies in the six decades to come, it established Sean Connery as, for many, the definitive 007, and in a film that, in retrospect, appears closest of all to Fleming’s literary characterisation. Of course, compared with the later Connery films, Dr. No was made on a very tentative budget, in total contrast to most of the mainstream films of 1962, but there was something decidedly expansive about the first of Terence Young’s three Bond directions, making exquisite use of Fleming’s beloved Jamaica, and turning Ursula Andress’s bikini-clad emergence from the Caribbean to the tune of Under The Mango Tree into one of cinema’s most iconic scenes. Even if the Bond films wouldn’t extend to a further 24 pictures, Dr. No stands out as an enjoyable and engaging ‘60s spy film, with colour and wit, as opposed to the tendency towards bleak Cold War themes in other examples of the genre. What it also introduced is, arguably, the most famous signature music in film history - played over the equally distinct gun barrel opening - and featuring a dark, distorted electric guitar riff (apparently written in just two minutes) at a moment in music history when rock and roll was still in its infancy, and mainstream cinema audiences were only likely to respond to orchestral scores and easy-listening music.
10. Spectre
What we now know as Daniel Craig’s penultimate Bond film had a tough act to follow in Skyfall. By now, too, there was a story arc to continue, after the Vesper Lynd/Quantum thread, and the introduction - in concept - of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Skyfall. Here, Blofeld is finally revealed, this time in the guise of Christoph Waltz. The trouble with Spectre is that it does have an impossible task after Skyfall - a task made harder by the fact that Sam Mendes directed both. Spectre has divided opinion amongst Bond fans, with some (including critics) branding it a disappointment. I think that’s harsh: all of the Craig films have been subtly dark and notably grittier than any in 007 history. Perhaps the ending is a little weak, with Bond encountering his arch-nemesis after yet another attempt to blow up the MI6 headquarters (one of our greatest national jokes - the Secret Intelligence Service located in one of the most prominent buildings on the London riverside, right next to Vauxhall Station…), but getting there meant plenty of terrific Bond romps, from the Day Of The Dead opening set-piece in Mexico City to the car chase in Rome, and then 007 chasing down the kidnapped Léa Seydoux in a plane eventually shorn of its wings.
9. Thunderball (1965)
We reach single figures in this ranking with Sean Connery’s fourth instalment, and another example of a hard act to follow, coming straight after the genre-defining Goldfinger. Thunderball was actually meant to be the first Fleming novel to be adapted for the big screen, but it became the centre of complex legal wrangling between Fleming and producers over claims that the book was actually based on an original screenplay. That legal dispute wasn’t resolved until as recently as 2006. That not withstanding, Thunderball booked a solid entry in the series, a ‘proper’ Bond film, with spectacular locations, sharks and underwater sequences, a clever use of an RAF Vulcan bomber as centrepiece of peak 1960s nuclear jeopardy, and Bond almost dying at a health farm. Of nothing more than a sidenote, Connery effectively remade Thunderball with the semi-serious Never Say Never Again, in which Porridge writers Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais reused one of my favourite gags from the prison sitcom - [Nurse - holding a sample jar]: “Mr. Fletcher - could you fill this for me please?” [Fletcher - sat on a hospital bed]: “What, from here?”].
8. Casino Royale (2006)
Cinema’s James Bond needed resetting. After the CGI horrors of Die Another Day, 007 faced new competition, most significantly, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, which tapped into the post-9/11 new world order of electronic warfare, cultural paranoia and a very different kind of paramilitary spycraft that made dinner jackets and vodka-martinis irrelevant. Perhaps sensing the acute ridicule Pierce Brosnan’s ultimate appearance had met (but with the actor still expected to play Bond again), established Bond screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade sought to return the franchise to its classic origins with Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel (indeed, his debut as a novellist) and based on his own experiences during the Second World War as a British naval intelligence officer. The Bond Fleming had invented for Casino Royale was meant to be an “extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened” adding that he saw Bond as “a blunt instrument”, attached to ”the dullest name I ever heard [James Bond]”. With Brosnan eventually ruling himself out of another Bond film for, apparently, fear of going into his 50s like Roger Moore had done, Broccoli heirs Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli found their “blunt instrument”, a relatively diminutive, blond-haired actor who’d been building his reputation as a solid character actor in film and television, leading to a standout performance as a drug dealer in Matthew Vaughan’s Layer Cake. Opinion was split when he was announced as the new Bond as he patently didn’t look like any of the Bonds before, not even Moore. Looking back, it was a masterstroke: Casino Royale took Bond back to the start of his ’00’ licence, recalling his first kill as well as the love affair for Vesper Lynd that would be part of the story arc ultimately No Time To Die will resolve, along with Craig’s tenure. New Zealander Martin Campbell, who’d helmed the BBC nuclear thriller Edge Of Darkness, as well as Brosnan’s Bond debut, GoldenEye, was tasked with turning Craig into James Bond, and refreshing the Bond machine for the 21st century. Out went the nonsense of Die Another Day and in came a Bond closer to the civil servant that Michael Caine played in the Harry Palmer films, albeit with a better wardrobe, better locations, and an Aston Martin DB9. The four-year break between Casino and its predecessor built up a dam wall of expectation, which meant that crowds swarmed to see the new incarnation of 007 with a mixture of curiosity and expectation. They weren’t disappointed, and nor were the film’s producers, coining in $606 million worldwide, the highest-grossing James Bond film to date.
7. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
Logic might dictate, or at least suggest, that the Bond film which marked its star’s only appearance in the role might have been a turkey. OHMSS was anything but, but it confounds to this day why George Lazenby made just one appearance as 007. Taken as a whole, OHMSS is a perfect Bond film (many will rank it even higher than I have done), and while Lazenby - who at 29 was the youngest actor ever to play the lead - didn’t have, perhaps, the same impact or charisma as Sean Connery, who he replaced, director Peter R. Hunt orchestrates a fantastic adventure. Telly Savalas nails it as Blofeld, while his Swiss lair’s collection of ‘Angels Of Death’ being brainwashed for the purpose of spreading a deadly virus includes a young Joanna Lumley and a pre-Magpie Jenny Hanley. Arguably, though, the standout of OHMSS is Diana Rigg as Bond’s ultimate, and ill-fated love interest, Contessa Tracy di Vicenzo, the actress at her most beautiful, playing the part as the model for Eva Green’s much later classy portrayal of Vesper Lynd. As for Lazenby, his single outing as Bond can simply be explained as his choice. He confounded everyone - including the Bond production team - by walking away from the role, at some point explaining his decision thus: “Fantasy doesn’t interest me. Reality does. Anyone who’s in touch with the kids knows what’s happening, knows the mood. Watch pop music and learn what’s going to happen. Most film-makers don’t watch and aren’t in touch.”
6. Live And Let Die (1973)
The arrival of the the third actor to play Bond - Roger Moore - heralded something of a tonal shift for the franchise. 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever cemented Sean Connery’s status as the definitive 007, returning after Lazenby’s brief stint for one more turn with all the bells and whistles of a classic Bond film, with the 1970s budget and sideburns to boot. For Moore’s debut, writer Tom Mankiewicz and director Guy Hamilton dipped faithfully into the plot of Ian Fleming’s 1954 novel, with a storyline involving Bond in tackling a North American smuggling operation tinged with Caribbean voodoo, and dipped perilously into the blaxploitation cinematic movement, just two years after Richard Rowntree’s Shaft had made black urban themes hip. While this might sound like a convoluted association for a Bond film, Moore’s arrival - relatively fresh on the back of his 1960s exploits as TV’s The Saint (as well as, bizarrely, the US Western series Maverick) did reset the series. Moore, for a start, was not the dark-haired Bond that Connery and Lazenby had conformed to - in many people’s eyes epitomising the character Fleming had imagined. But with Live And Let Die, Moore’s slightly camp, safari suit-wearing Bond had not yet developed, the eye-winking was held back for future outings. What we got was a genuinely entertaining romp that holds its magic still, 48 years on, not least of which the speedboat race through the Louisana bayous that was a mainstay clip of TV’s children’s film quiz Screen Test with Michael Rodd. Live And Let Die was, too, possibly the first consciously hip Bond film, driven by Paul McCartney’s memorable theme tune, the voodoo and, in Yaphet Kotto as “Mr. Big”/Kananga, a welcome break from the Nehru-jacketed, cat-stroking Blofeld role.
5. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Some fans and critics still struggle to acknowledge Diamonds as one of the great Bond films, but I’m always ready to challenge that point of view. Because when you take it as a hole, it’s a lot of fun, with at-times batshit-mad set-pieces that probably provided most of the blueprint for the Austin Powers piss-takes, but not so much that it descends into self-parody. Even accepting that Connery returned to 007 for one last time for the pay packet, he doesn’t appear as disinterested as well he might, and fits into the semi-serious plot with ease and authority. Opinion is still mixed, of course, on the presence of camp baddies Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, or indeed of Charles Grey’s equally waspish Blofeld, but the early scenes in Amsterdam will always resonate with me as a former resident of that city, and with Las Vegas - another of my haunts - providing a sun-kissed backdrop to the whole yarn’s conclusion, we have one of the more memorable films in the series, even if it as far removed from the darkness of earlier and later entries. And if nothing else, it has that Shirley Bassey theme song.
4. You Only Live Twice (1967)
As the Bond film that came out in the year of my birth, I have a particular affinity for You Only Live Twice. That fondness gets stronger at the thought of yet another classic John Barry theme tune - sung by Nancy Sinatra - (shamelessly purloined by Robbie Williams for his hit Millennium…). But as the fifth episode in the series, you got the feeling that Cubby Broccoli was hitting his stride in terms of the What Can We Do This Time? challenge. Thus, the sets were more ambitious, the locations more exotic, the stunts that much more outrageous, and designer Ken Adam’s hollowed-out volcano cleverly provided the Bond films with one of the all-time brilliant finales in cinema history. Perhaps not enough credit goes to Roald Dahl, who reapplied the kooky whimsy of his children’s writing to a contemporary spy thriller (a reversal of Ian Fleming also writing Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang), or director Lewis Gilbert’s expansive vision, injecting the same sense of big-sky drama he put into Reach For The Sky, the Douglas Bader biopic. Gilbert would seemingly reuse some of the gags in You Only Live Twice for the aforementioned Moonraker, but that shouldn’t be held against him, as this 1967 entry justifiably sits well in the Top 5 Bond Films for being, frankly, the full package.
3. Skyfall (2012)
2012 was quite the year for Brand Britain, what with the London Olympics opening with Bond himself - Daniel Craig - appearing on Her Majesty’s service with HRH herself. But with the arrival of Skyfall, directed by no less a figure as Sam Mendes, Bond took on an altogether more adventurous cinematic heft. A lot of that is down to Roger Deakins’ exquisite cinematography - the brief scene of 007 swimming in the rooftop pool of a Shanghai hotel is arguably my favourite scene in any Bond film ever, purely for its artistic quality. But in Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan’s script, Skyfall delves deeper than ever into Bond’s past, with Javier Bardem’s Double-O agent-gone bad Silva (and even a moment of homo-erotic tension between them), forcing an emotional, maternal connection between Judi Dench’s M and Craig’s 007. From start to finish, Mendes created a truly compelling Bond film, without compromising on all the gags we love the series for just to underline his theatre credentials. Skyfall also became the first Bond film in history to feature Britain, prominently, with its final third drawing a geographic line between London and Scotland, as Bond and M take the iconic Aston Martin up to the titular Skyfall, the Bond ancestral family home, for a spectacular (and surprisingly moving) final showdown with Silva.
2. Goldfinger (1964)
Watching all the early ’60s Bond films now shows up their contemporary technical deficiencies. Goldfinger’s iconic car chase, for example, with 007 driving the Aston Martin DB5 around the portly villain’s Swiss factory (actually, it was an industrial park in Wales) was as much as the age’s cinema could provide, with Sean Connery clearly sat inside a motionless Aston while a backscreen jerked around him. But that’s looking at Goldfinger through a 2021 viewer’s sophistication, where we can no longer tell the difference between real and CGI. I raise all this in my thoughts about Goldfinger merely to get them out of the way. Because in the third Bond film, Cubby Broccoli stepped up a significant gear. Director Guy Hamilton pulled off the first properly ‘classic’ Bond film, arguably setting the blueprint for every one that followed. It’s a view shared by Daniel Craig himself, who named Goldfinger his favourite of the entire series: “Just everything about it,” he told the Sunday Times. “The suits and the car and the look and the feel of it. This is Bond firing on all cylinders.” After the Caribbean setting of Dr. No, and the European landscape of From Russia With Love, Guy Hamilton took Bond into a more expansive spread of locations (a hallmark of the series ever since) - the Fontainbleu Hotel in Miami where Bond takes on Auric Goldfinger at cards, the Swiss alps where he encounters Tilly Masterson, the Kentucky stud farm where Goldfinger literally wipes out the Mafia, and then the actual Fort Knox, where Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus kicks off the audacious plot to detonate a nuclear bomb inside the US gold reserve. After the rudimentary briefcase of From Russia With Love, Q Branch also stepped up their game with Goldfinger, delivering arguably Bond’s most famous gadget, the DB5 with “modifications” that included an ejector seat for unwanted passengers, machine guns in the lighting recesses, revolving number plates, an early form of satnav, bullet-proof screen, tyre-slashing wheel hubs and an oil slick delivery system. In Gert Frobe, the German actor (well, his voice stand-in, British actor Michael Collins) we had one of the all-time great Bond/Bond villain interactions: [Bond] “Do you expect me to talk?” [Goldfinger]: “No Mr. Bond! I expect you to die!” as a laser beam edges closer to the Bond family jewels.
1. From Russia With Love (1963)
It might be counter-intuitive to position the second-oldest Bond film as its best, given that it lacks the technical brilliance of the most recent, with 21st century production values, but From Russia With Love for me combines all the things I love about Bond films with all the things I love about spy thrillers. Made just 12 months after Dr. No, director Terence Young swapped the debut’s sun-kissed Caribbean setting for the considerably greyer tones of Eastern Europe, as Bond comes up against SMERSH seeking revenge for the death of Dr. No in the first film. What it lacks in the outrageous gadgetry that would follow (Q’s greatest contribution is a nifty “standard issue attaché case” containing an Armalite rifle, a throwing knife, tear gas canisters disguised as talcum powder tins, and a string of gold sovereigns), it more than makes up for in sophistication. In Robert Shaw’s body builder Red Grant, Bond meets one of the first great adversaries, especially in their thrilling, claustrophobic encounter on a train, along with second, Lotte Lenya as SPECTRE’s knife-in-shoe-wielding ‘No.3’ Rosa Klebb. We also get a full first glimpse of Bond’s refined pedantry, when he requests a coffee from Ali Kerim Bey, head of MI6 ‘Station T-Turkey’ in Istanbul, and orders it “medium sweet”. I have never known what that actually means - one lump or three? - but its a scripting touch that adds to the overall cool of From Russia With Love that, arguably, the Bond franchise would not return to until Timothy Dalton’s first appearance, The Living Daylights, fully coming back with the Daniel Craig era that is about to come to an end.
I've treated you well, even when you was out of order, right?!
One lunchtime, not so long ago (actually, quite some time ago, in the days when there were things called offices) and when I had a job near London’s Tower Bridge, I left my desk to go for a stroll around the historic backstreets of Wapping. What began as a cathartic midday plod in the late summer sunshine soon became a literal walk down Memory Lane, as I mooched about streets I hadn’t visited in 30 years, not since the days when I had to visit the offices of The Sun and Sunday Times while working for Sky TV.
Rupert Murdoch had, not long before I joined Sky, decamped his newspapers from Fleet Street to ‘Fortress Wapping’, a divisive move that changed British newspaper publishing forever, as the tycoon belligerently took on the print unions in an acrimonious and, at times, violent period of media history. Like much of Wapping, the area around News International’s site at the junction of Virginia and Pennington streets had once been staunch working class, populated by dockers and their families. Today, Murdoch's presence is long gone, with the newspaper industry undergoing further schism in the online age (with News International losing, along the way, the News Of The World, a victim of its own dubious practice).
Walking back to St. Katherine’s Dock, which my then-office overlooked, I ambled close to the river on Wapping High Street. Making a turn, I found myself in Scandrett Street, where I was confronted by a typical canyon of newish brick buildings, designed to resemble the warehouses that once lined the area, and now a testament to rampant gentrification. It was then that it struck me that this was precisely the vision that fictional mobster Harold Shand had had at the end of the 1970s when he had the idea to do something about the dilapidated streets of E1.
This, then, is the basis of The Long Good Friday, one of the finest British films ever made, and which was released 40 years ago this week. “This is the decade in which London will become Europe's capital, having cleared away the out-dated,” Shand pronounces on the deck of his gleaming yacht, moored in front of the Tower of London, as he tries to convince an American mafia delegation to come in on his project to regenerate the East End. “We've got mile after mile or acre after acre of land for our future prosperity,” he continues. “No other city in the world has got, right at its centre, such an opportunity for profitable progress.” He was incredibly prophetic. After decades of post-war wrangling about what to do with the area, in the same year that The Long Good Friday was released, Michael Heseltine created the London Docklands Development Corporation. By the end of the 80s and the start of the 90s, Docklands itself was transformed. Post-Big Bang, the banks and their bankers moved east. Canary Wharf was built on the Isle of Dogs, and continues to grow to this day, with gleaming spire after gleaming spire springing up like cocktail sticks planted on a Cream Cracker. Today it might be quieter due to the lack of office workers, but it is no less a powerful symbol of the economic aspiration that stretches out of several boroughs spreading east down the Thames from Tower Bridge.
But back to Scandrett Street, which plays a notorious role in The Long Good Friday: as I stood there, staring at faux history clad in modernity, I felt a shiver of familiarity, despite having never been in that place before. Opposite the new developments was a wrought iron fence surrounding the garden of St. John’s Church. For East End authenticity, it could have been Albert Square itself, but something told me that I had seen that fence in some other context. Sometime later, reading up on the production of The Long Good Friday, I discovered what had been there before - at the end of that street (and now long gone, the result of modernistic development) was The Lion & Unicorn pub, the East End boozer blown up by - at the outset of the film - hoodlums on Good Friday.
The John Mackenzie-directed thriller remains one of the greatest British films ever made, but its use of London locations, in particular, made it so rich. It was also uncompromising. Appearing a year or so after the comedic Minder arrived on British TV screens, itself a distant descendent from The Sweeney, and around the same time that Only Fools And Horses made its debut, The Long Good Friday was an equally colourful depiction of shady London life, but with an infinitely deeper agenda. Barrie Keefe’s bristling story combined IRA terrorism, a mafia plot, a prototype yuppie (in Shand) before the term had ever been used, and was populated with a cast of cracking British talent.
Bob Hoskins remains throughout a mesmerising, Napoleonic figure, with his boxer’s nose and street-smart belligerence, trying to understand who and why anyone would be trying to derail his grand vision, unaware that one of his gang has become embroiled in a dodgy deal with terrorists in Belfast, who exact their revenge on Shand’s empire in startling form. Shand’s quotes throughout the film are legend, especially the “I’ve put money in all your pockets!” near-soliloquy at the top of this post, but also his admonishment of the American mafiosi as they renege on their agreement inside The Savoy hotel: “What I’m looking for is someone who can contribute to what England has given to the world: culture, sophistication, genius. A little bit more than a ’ot dog, know what I mean?” he quips, with tongue not entirely in cheek. “I’m glad I found out in time just what a partnership with a pair of wankers like you would’ve been,” he thunders on, probably not grasping the fact that Americans wouldn’t know what sort of an insult that was.
Critics have tried to analyse The Long Good Friday, even attempting to make parallels to The Godfather, given both films’ levels of brutality and their central figures of gangsters trying to change their business models. Like Mario Puzo’s somewhat Shakespearian tragedy, quintessentially a New York tale, The Long Good Friday is pure London, as the list of filming locations pertains. Nothing has come close since, not Guy Ritchie’s geezerfests or anything in Danny Dyer’s canon. It works because London’s Docklands were bleak at the beginning of the 1980s and, even now, if you look closely, still are. It’s just that the converted warehouses that line the river, housing London’s new urban elite, have given it a respectable polish, the kind of aspiration that Shand himself had envisioned. Paul Barber (who played ‘Errol the Ponce’, mutilated in his kitchen by Shand henchman 'Razors'), this week likened Hoskins’ character to the principle character in Only Fools And Horses, in which he also appeared: “The thing that got me was Harold’s speech on the boat [at St. Katherine’s Dock],” Barber told The Guardian this week. “Think about it now: it has all happened. It was the Thatcher era and he was like the young Del Boy.”
“Nobody had done a movie like that as far as I can recollect,” Helen Mirren, who played Shand’s moll-like wife Victoria, also told The Guardian. “It broke ground,” she said, saying that she was blown away from the outset by Keefe’s script. “It was like a piece of literature, and movie scripts don’t tend to be like that. This one you read like a novel. With the exception that my female character was terrible – she was very, very dull.” That may have been the case - and I’m sure Mirren wouldn’t deny that Victoria serves as little more than window dressing to the piece - but the film is certainly novel-like, as Shand questions why things are going increasingly wrong with his grand plan. And, of course, it ends so brilliantly without conclusion: as Shand exits The Savoy for a rendezvous with Victoria, he jumps into his chauffeur-driven ride, only to see his wife being hauled off in the opposite direction under duress. As he realises the unfolding situation, a figure - Pierce Brosnan in his film debut - pops up in the front seat wielding a silenced pistol. Much like the final scene of The Sopranos, it’s up to you to decide what happens next. But whereas Tony Soprano’s fate is subtly ambiguous, the elongated closing sequence of The Long Good Friday, set to Francis Monkman’s driving score, sees Shand gazing out of the Jag’s window, seemingly accepting his fate.
It was, without doubt, the film that planted Hoskins in our consciousness. He’d made his breakthrough a couple of years before in the BBC’s adaptation of Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, and he would sort of return to the Shand character five years later in Mona Lisa. In The Long Good Friday, Hoskins is the focal point of a fascinating essay about Britain at the beginning of the 1980s. Keefe has appeared to shy away from casting it as a great sociological snapshot, with director Mackenzie calling it just “a damned good gangster movie”. But 40 years on, as we address many contemporary issues about morality, race and even patriotism, The Long Good Friday holds up on so many levels, not the least being that it’s British film making at its very best.
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?
The BBC's cracking new organised crime drama McMafia has created a dilemma for the Beeb - what if its star, James Norton, gets poached to be the next James Bond? It's an interesting question: Daniel Craig has agreed to one more outing as 007, but by the time the film currently known only as 'Bond 25' appears on its target date of November 8, 2019, he will be 51 - two years older than Pierce Brosnan when his last, Die Another Day, was released (although Sir Roger Moore was 58 when he finally hung up the Walther PPK with A View To A Kill).
Age should not necessarily be a barrier, of course, but with the series becoming grittier and more physical for the lead actor since its reboot with Craig and Casino Royale in 2006, his seemingly petulant 2015 statement that he’d “rather slit his wrists” than do another Bond may have had some foundation. Craig's tone has, though, since changed (a lucrative contract will do that, of course) and it is believed that he will again be joined by Naomie Harris as Miss Moneypenny, Ben Whishaw as Q and Ralph Fiennes as M, with Yann Demange, directing. Neal Purvis and Robert Wade - who’ve written the last six Bond films - are also said to be working on the script.
As with the previous productions, the film's name and cast will probably only be revealed at a press event roughly a year before the movie opens, so late this year. Between now and the actual release date we will have to speculate on the plot, although apparent leaks have suggested that it will see Bond quit MI6 and get married. Not exactly the basis of a ripping action flick, though if it follows the plot of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, in which the newly-betrothed 007 quickly becomes a widower, then there are grounds for revenge and the usual mayhem can ensue.
Assuming, though, that '25' will be Craig's last Bond film, the race has already begun to replace him. After much (credible) speculation about Idris Elba (too old), Tom Hardy (too brawny and probably already too old) and Tom Hiddlestone (too fey), James Norton has emerged as a standout candidate. His current portrayal of Alex Godman, the English-raised son of Russian mobsters in McMafia, has possibly provided the same Bond audition as Layer Cake did for Daniel Craig (I rewatched it recently - he basically was Bond...). Ironically, McMafia's New Year's Day BBC1 premiere drew an audience of six million - a million more than the ITV premiere of Craig's last Bond film, Spectre. At least the BBC know they’ve got a couple of years to cram in more of its dramatisation of journalist Misha Glenny's non-fiction book before its star gets poached by the Broccoli family.
Picture: Nick Wall/BBC/Cuba
That said, as easy as it is to see the Cambridge-educated Norton as Bond on the back of his brooding role (not to mention well-cut tailoring) in McMafia, it is an altogether more gentle performance that marked him out for me as a possible 007: Diane Keaton's cocky but charming son in the soppy-but-amusing Hampstead. Throw in his more recent psychopathic turn in Line Of Duty, and you've got the perfect candidate to give James Bond a new lease of life in the next chapter of the longest running - and best - series in cinema history.
