With the audition process for the next James Bond officially underway, it’s finally safe to say that a new 007 will soon come down the pike in his silver Aston Martin DB5. A few names have emerged as “favorites” based solely on rumors, among them English actors Callum Turner (Fantastic Beasts and Masters of the Air) and Harris Dickinson (The Iron Claw and Babygirl), as well as Australian heartthrob Jacob Elordi (Euphoria and Frankenstein).
But Debbie McWilliams, who cast the last three Bond actors—Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan, and Timothy Dalton—thinks that the next iteration of the MI6 superspy should be portrayed by an actor who’s unfamiliar to most.”
“It is absolutely essential that he retains a total enigma,” McWilliams told the Independent. “I don’t want to see any of them as Bond because we now know so much about them. We want to know as little about them personally as possible, because that’s what spies are. We don’t need to know where he goes shopping or who his parents are, or where he lives. We never want to see him at home. And a vital element of the whole thing is his job description. He’s licensed to kill, and we have to believe that he can do that. If you don’t, then you’ve lost the audience.”
While Brosnan, Dalton, and Craig were made household names after stepping into Bond’s tux, McWilliams points out that all three were really only known by indie film fans, if at all, at the time of their casting.
“Timothy and Pierce weren’t particularly well known,” she says. “Daniel had had a career in independent films and a fairly colourful romantic life beforehand, but he wasn’t a household name, and that helps enormously.”
It’s hard to see Craig as anyone other than Bond now, but news of his casting ahead of the release of 2006’s Casino Royale proved especially controversial as he was pitted against his predecessors. Notably, Craig was the first blonde-haired Bond, the shortest, and by far the most physically built.
“He was such an unpopular choice,” McWilliams told the outlet. “Nobody supported it. Not the studio. Not the director.” She went on to describe the press conference announcing him as the star as “completely disastrous.”
“I’ve never seen anybody look as uncomfortable as Daniel did that day. It was awful. And all these reports came out, that he couldn’t drive, he couldn’t do this, he couldn’t do that, and I have a theory that this totally spurred him on. He thought, ‘I’m going to show you bastards,’ and he did. And everybody went, ‘Oh my God, isn’t he wonderful?’ So don’t ask the people who they want, because they won’t know.”
The Craig era of strong female counterparts like Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd (Casino Royale) and Ana de Armas’s Paloma (2021’s No Time to Die) have reflected society’s progressivism, even Williams maintains that Bond himself shouldn’t be made “woke,” i.e. a woman or person of color. “It’s how Ian Fleming wrote it,” she says. “Why would you want to change that? They haven’t changed Harry Potter to Alice Potter or to a different ethnicity. That’s how it was written and that’s how it should remain, I believe.”
While McWilliams brushed off the Independent‘s inquiry into her pick for the next Bond, she, she’s hoping to see someone “who is completely out of the blue.” Whoever it is, they’ll have their work cut out for them. “It’s probably the toughest job that anyone’s going to have to do in the acting world,” she said, “excluding perhaps Tom Cruise.”