‘It was a train wreck! I was terrified’: how the new James Bond will be announced – and what can go wrong
And then there were five. While nothing has been officially announced, it is widely understood that the shortlist to replace Daniel Craig as James Bond is now down to a handful of actors: Callum Turner, Jack Lowden, Josh O’Connor, Robert Pattinson and Nicholas Hoult.
The hunt for a new Bond comes at a propitious moment for the franchise as a whole, 25 films in (not counting the two “unofficial” entries, Casino Royale in 1967 and Never Say Never Again in 1983). After Daniel Craig stood down from the role after completing No Time to Die (in which Bond appeared to be killed in a missile strike), Amazon MGM Studios paid over $1bn to acquire “creative control” from Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the British-American heirs to the series’ original producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and longtime stewards of the Bond films.
Amazon has lost no time in indicating that it aims to change direction, hiring Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight to write the script and Denis Villeneuve to direct; it’s consolidating the franchise’s move away from the safe-pair-of-hands directors that Cubby Broccoli preferred, and the writing contributions of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who have screenplay credits on the last seven Bond films. A new lead actor will send the clearest signals of their intentions for the future for what is the sixth most lucrative franchise in cinema history, having accrued more than $7.8bn in box office returns since 1962.
Six actors have previously been given the role, and Amazon MGM will be looking for certain qualities in its new lead. Robert Sellers, who comprehensively researched the Bond casting process in his 2024 book The Search for Bond, says the balance between sophistication and brutality is vital. “You have this man, Bond, who can hang out in casinos but can also get down and dirty and take out half the Russian army. If you read the novels, Bond is dangerous, he’s a killer. So as a Bond, you need that roughness, but also that debonair touch. I think this is where Daniel Craig scored so highly – he had that street fighter element.”
Once the decision is made, the way it is communicated to the outside world is a key moment in the process – not just for the franchise but also in the transformational effect it has on the life of the actor concerned. In 1962, it was a low-key affair: a 15-line article in trade magazine the Daily Cinema announced “Meet James Bond …”, accompanied by a photograph of a fresh-faced Sean Connery holding a cigarette. Compare that to events 43 years later in 2005, when Daniel Craig was sent bombing down the Thames on a Royal Marine speedboat, followed by a press conference at HMS President, a shore unit of the Royal Naval Reserve.
But things don’t always go to plan. Safety regulations meant that Craig had to wear a lifejacket – non-debonair optics that were widely ridiculed in the media – and at the subsequent press call he appeared somewhat intimidated by the attention. It was an experience that Craig himself later described as “a fucking train wreck … I was terrified”.
It now appears that at least part of the reason behind Craig’s inauspicious introduction was that the producers were concerned that the secret of his casting was on the verge of getting out. A senior film publicist familiar with the Daniel Craig announcement told the Guardian: “The PR company involved were scrambled at short notice to help pull together the press conference because there had been a significant leak. A logistics company were brought in to do the whole coming down the Thames on the speedboat bit – he had to wear a lifejacket and the tabloids decided to go to town.”
The publicist added: “Daniel had been properly prepped but when the music comes on and he walks down the gangway to the front you can see he’s gone a bit rabbit in the headlights. All those questions he had been prepped for were getting fired at him – and he just clammed up.”
Craig soon put that to rights in the first few minutes of Casino Royale, in which his Bond administers a brutal beating to a corrupt fellow agent in a Prague gents’. Fortunately, however, Craig’s publicists never had to deal with anything like the interview Connery gave shortly after his casting announcement, one of several intended to introduce him to a wider audience. In an encounter that, if it happened now, would likely kill the entire franchise stone dead, Connery expounded on his theories of when and how it was acceptable to hit women, throwing demonstration punches at Sunday Express writer Susan Barnes. Presumably this display was designed to lean into what Connery called the “cruel, sadistic” elements of the Bond persona.
By the time George Lazenby was given the nod to take over the role after Connery resolved to leave, the unveiling of the new actor took place in 1968 at what became a Bond tradition: a press conference at an expensive London hotel. When Roger Moore finally got the gig in 1972 – after being ruled out in 1961 and 1968 with prior commitments to TV shows The Saint and The Persuaders respectively – he was photographed enjoying a fat cigar on the roof of the Dorchester, an image that set the tone for his segment of the Bond series.
Control of information is another issue with Bond: in the 1980s and 1990s, the series was still big news, even if box office returns were at a low ebb (Licence to Kill, in 1989, is the least successful Bond film at the box office, adjusted for inflation). Pierce Brosnan was offered The Living Daylights in 1986 but, ironically, the resulting buzz motivated NBC to renew his then-dormant TV show, Remington Steele, and thereby preventing him from taking the role. The press ferreted out the name of his replacement, Timothy Dalton, while Dalton was still working on another film in Puerto Rico, where he was besieged by reporters. In what now appears an amazingly behind-hand move, Dalton was first presented to the outside world at a press call in Vienna, well after filming on The Living Daylights had begun.
In the 2020s, the media landscape is vastly different, even from Craig’s debut two decades ago; Amazon MGM may feel it doesn’t need the traditional press call, and announces the new Bond via a social media post to trigger what is likely to be a tsunami of engagement. The senior film publicist says: “It’s a cliche, but we all like it, all the photographers and the pictures, the news journalists and entertainment journalists, and now influencers and other things that are patched in. I would love to see a good old-fashioned Bond press conference with whoever it is.
“It’s what Bond represents: a sense that everything else might change, but the Bond movies haven’t. The fact that it’s reported across every platform on a daily basis right now is huge. It transcends politics, leftwing and rightwing. It doesn’t matter, everybody’s got a an opinion.”