Shaken and Stirred by the Search for the Next James Bond
How was your weekend? Did you find an unexpected person in your bed? Did you slay a couple of heavies with your bare hands, then do it again, with extra venom? Did you save the world? If not, I have bad news: you are not the next James Bond. The quest for a new occupant of what remains, despite everything, the hottest seat in cinema—the role of 007—reached its latest climax on October 23rd to 25th, in London. Thither, “according to several sources,” in the words of The Hollywood Reporter, a chosen few were summoned to butch it out for the ultimate honor. Talk about a Bonding exercise.
Who those sources were cannot, of course, be revealed. Like purveyors of royal gossip, Bond whisperers never identify themselves; to do so would be to court the fate of Professor Dent, in “Dr. No,” who is shot after attempting—the fool!—to kill Bond with a mere tarantula. (The actor playing Dent, Anthony Dawson, had already tried to do away with Grace Kelly, in “Dial M for Murder,” and been stabbed for his pains. How epic can fails be?) Anyway, we are now informed, reliably or not, that the final contestants for the part of 007 include Jack Lowden, Callum Turner, and Josh O’Connor. Otherwise known, as any TV addict will tell you, as that guy from “Slow Horses,” that guy from “Masters of the Air,” and that guy with the ears who played Prince Charles in “The Crown.” Also allegedly in the running: Jack O’Connell, who, in “Sinners,” became one of the first vampires to dance an Irish jig. In a solemn aside, the Reporter adds, “It is unclear who else may be testing.”
In short, we haven’t a clue. In recent years, all too many names have drifted in and out of the frame: Idris Elba, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Henry Cavill, Jacob Elordi, Richard Madden, Tom Hardy, Theo James, and Paul Mescal, although, given how miserable Mescal looked when he had to fight someone who was riding a rhino, in “Gladiator 2,” his odds may have lengthened. Age is another disqualifier. Elba, now fifty-four, was touted as a possible Bond for so long that his chance has come and gone, whereas Lowden, Turner, and O’Connor are thirty-six. A decade ago, the Irish actor Aidan Turner (you may have seen him in “Poldark,” on PBS) was all the rage, and his compound of intensity and levity, like that of his countryman Pierce Brosnan, appeared to fit the bill—one of Bond’s defining knacks, after all, is for orchestrating the victory of good over evil without taking either of them too seriously. But Aidan Turner is forty-three, and, like most of us, he will surely recall the crowning exchange, between hero and villain, that lends “The Spy Who Loved Me” its philosophical weight:
One man whose mortal time ran out this year, to the understandable dismay of his admirers, was Sam Neill. Born in Northern Ireland, he grew up in New Zealand before relocating to Australia, and that cultural backdrop, fronted by his other virtues, might have made him an excellent Bond. He was dashing, effortlessly amused, and quite unassuming in his command of our attention—so much so, indeed, that he specified how badly he did not wish to play 007. “I wouldn’t have been any good and I wouldn’t have enjoyed it,” he once said. In 1986, nonetheless, he went to Pinewood Studios, outside London, for a screen test. It survives online, enabling lunatics like me, who treasure films that never came to pass, to watch Neill intone the sacred liturgy of Bond. Entering his bedroom, he discovers that he is not alone:
There is almost too much to unpack here. First, the intruder, lying in wait and in bed, is gamely played for the purposes of the audition by Fiona Fullerton, who only the year before had been in “A View to a Kill,” Roger Moore’s last movie as Bond. Second, where is the choker? The sequence is lifted from the second Bond film, “From Russia with Love,” in which, as Tatiana, Daniela Bianchi—lest we forget, a former Miss Universo Italia—wears a black choker and barely anything else. Details matter, as they did for Ian Fleming, who, in the original novel of “From Russia with Love,” not only bedecks Tatiana with “a quarter-inch black velvet ribbon round her neck” but also saddles her with an awkward, if well-meaning, gaffe:
One wonders if this repartee, which was wisely omitted from the script, rang in the ears of James Brolin, who reënacted the same scene, with a British accent and a touch of aplomb, for his screen test, in 1982. He was up for the role of Bond in “Octopussy,” and his Tatiana, for the test, was played by Maud Adams. (No Bondian needs reminding that she had earned her spurs as Scaramanga’s doomed girlfriend in “The Man with the Golden Gun.” Do keep up.) In the event, although Brolin believed that the part was his, and even had orders to “prepare certain muscles for certain things I wasn’t adept at yet,” Moore returned for his sixth excursion as Bond in “Octopussy,” opposite Adams. The state of Moore’s muscles is unrecorded.
There is another snippet of Bond that has been used to challenge contenders for the throne. It comes from “GoldenEye,” and it consists of Bond introducing himself to Xenia Onatopp, one of his nemeses, and smirking maturely as he hears her name. In 2005, with “Casino Royale” on the cards, actors such as Sam Worthington, Antony Starr, Rupert Friend, and Henry Cavill (then a stripling of twenty-two) were invited to pronounce the words “Bond—James Bond” for the camera. Casual clips display their halting efforts. Eventually, all the young dudes lost out to Daniel Craig, who, in the course of five films, went on to make the role his own—and, it must be said, to demonstrate the toll that it took. Craig’s appeal was undimmed to the end, yet the joy slowly faded from his gaze, and maybe the question we ought to be asking is not “Who will be the next Bond?” but “Who in his right mind would want to be Bond?” Also, “Why do we still care who Bond is or isn’t?” Oh, and one last complicating factor: Bond is dead.
Critics who reviewed “No Time to Die,” Craig’s final Bond film, were cautioned against spoilers. It was made plain that anyone disclosing the destruction of 007, in a missile attack on a remote island, would earn a visit from a tarantula, or worse. Yet die he did, and his end signalled that of a long-standing deal; in 2025, the Bond franchise passed from the grasp of Eon to that of Amazon M-G-M. One was tempted to ask: Who’s the spoiler now? It was like SMERSH giving way to SPECTRE.
Fans feared the worst. Would Bond be chopped up and parcelled out in pieces: a spinoff series titled “Moneypenny,” perhaps, on Amazon Prime? Or a period peek at Bond the teen-aged Etonian, with pimples and a tailcoat? Consider the grievous damage done to “The Day of the Jackal,” when, in 2024, it was rehashed by Peacock and stretched to ten episodes, with all the twists undone. Imagine 007 unmanned by a comparable tedium—slumped in a greasy London flat, counting his nicotine patches and waiting for M to call.
Thus far, to be fair, a certain continuity has been established. There will be a full-length film, rather than a Bond-flavored show. The director will be Denis Villeneuve, fresh from “Dune: Part Three.” (The transition could be tricky; we may find Q pottering around with a tube coming out of his nose.) The screenplay will be written by Steven Knight, who created “Peaky Blinders.” Like his predecessors, he will be stuck with the standard problems. What does a criminal mastermind look like these days, for instance? Is he a trillionaire who designs a flying car? An algorithm? Or a devious Russian, jerking the chain of the free world? No fiction is needed to furnish those. By custom, we like a squeeze of reality with our 007, like lemon on an oyster, but no more than that. Remember the confusion of “Die Another Day,” which demanded that Bond be tortured by North Koreans and drive an invisible car?
James Bond, in truth, was never much of a character. He was a name with a dream attached—an expensively tailored suit, into which a succession of actors could slip. Minor adjustments were made to the inside leg. Such stylish emptiness is daunting, and one doesn’t envy those who are now being encouraged to try it on for size. Lowden has lingered so long in the dishevelled shadow of Gary Oldman, in “Slow Horses,” that we have yet to inspect him in the light. Turner I have barely observed, though his visage, carved and mean, suggests that he might obey my private rule for Bond: he should, in theory, be able to trade places with the villain. O’Connor, conversely, may be hampered by his sympathetic warmth. As a priest, in “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” he took a phone call from a troubled parishioner (Bridget Everett), and what ensued was, to my eyes, the most affecting scene in recent American cinema. The irony is that it meant physically shutting the door on his co-star, none other than Daniel Craig. Could it do the same to O’Connor’s prospects for Bond?
Who wins the race, and when the winner will be announced, none of us can say. Even then, the fuss will persist. It’s hard to forget the spectacle of Craig at his public launch, in 2005, when he was unveiled as the latest Bond. The poor guy had to travel up the Thames on a speedboat accompanied by Royal Marines but clad, laughably, in a life jacket, like a kid on an inflatable-donut ride. Suddenly, the in-joke that is uttered by George Lazenby, the harassed successor to Sean Connery as 007, near the start of “On His Majesty’s Secret Service”—“This never happened to the other fellow”—acquired a new and haunting significance. For Craig, it was not until the opening scenes of “Casino Royale,” when he shot one miscreant and butchered another in a bathroom, deploying the basin as an offensive weapon, that all the charges of wussiness were dismissed.
Is it too late to bring back Lazenby? He’s merely eighty-seven years old, and he seems in passable shape, though he may now require a bathroom for reasons other than homicide. Beyond that, I can nominate only one performer who meets all the criteria for Bond. The name’s Blunt. Emily Blunt. A verifiable grownup, she is also a proper film star, not a face you half recognize from TV. She can carry both a firearm, as she proved in Villeneuve’s “Sicario,” and an entire movie—see Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” in which she acted opposite O’Connor and spoke Russian. Blunt is quick-witted, languorous, panic-free, as funny as hell, and as English as strawberries and cream. In one swoop, she would take the hoary old trope of “Bond girl” and toss it in the trash. Needless to say, she won’t get the part of 007 (it only ever happens to another fellow), yet she merits it more thoroughly than any of the gang who gathered in London this past weekend. Here’s my plan: by way of a consolation prize, Lowden, Turner, O’Connor, and any other ex-hopefuls could drape themselves around Blunt on the poster for the next James Bond film, wearing brave smiles and tiny swimming trunks. Gentleman, here is your mission. You will be Bond boys. Good luck. ♦