Last week, Amazon MGM Studios confirmed their general timeline for casting the new James Bond. I believe we’ll probably have a shortlist of candidates by the end of August, and the actors who are already favored include Callum Turner, Jacob Elordi and Harris Dickinson. Well, the 007 franchise’s longtime casting director haaaates those choices. It’s not that she has anything against those guys personally or professionally, she just has very specific ideas about how the new Bond should be a relative unknown. Who knew that 007 casting would be the exact opposite of “let’s cast the guy with the most Instagram followers.”
Debbie McWilliams, the James Bond franchise’s longtime casting director, does not want to see rumored contenders Jacob Elordi, Callum Turner or Harris Dickinson pick up the 007 moniker. McWilliams worked on Bond movies for 40 years, starting with 1981’s “For Your Eyes Only” and running through 2021’s “No Time to Die,” and is responsible for casting Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. With McWilliams having retired before Amazon’s acquisition of the Bond franchise, the search for the next 007 actor falls to casting director Nina Gold and director Denis Villeneuve.
“I don’t want to see any of them as James Bond,” McWilliams recently told The Independent about Elordi, Turner and Dickinson, whose names continue to drive the rumor mill now that Amazon’s search for the next 007 is underway.
“It is absolutely essential that [Bond] retains a total enigma,” she explained. “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.”
McWilliams continued, “Timothy and Pierce weren’t particularly well known. Daniel had had a career in independent films and a fairly colorful romantic life beforehand, but he wasn’t a household name, and that helps enormously. I want to see somebody who is completely out of the blue.”
Bond should also remain a man because “it’s how Ian Fleming wrote it,” McWilliams added. “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 Daniel Craig wasn’t a household name before Bond, he was pretty well-known in acting circles and beyond? I remember seeing Daniel in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake in 2004 and thinking “wow, this is sort of a perfect Bond audition.” While I can see the argument that Jacob Elordi already has too much of a profile and is too “known,” that’s not true of Dickinson or Turner. I don’t know the first thing about Dickinson and “knowing stuff about celebrities” is my job. The only thing I know about Callum Turner is that he just married Dua Lipa. Beyond that, the guy is a total mystery. I have to say something else too… I think Denis Villeneuve is going to have the biggest say in the Bond casting, and I trust his instincts. For now.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid and Cover Images.
