Who’s your vote for the next James Bond?

[Lidgar]

A a side thought, I'm hoping for a 60s period reboot.

I’ve been wishing for this since before Casino Royal (Daniel Craig, not Peter Sellers et al.) came out.

 

[TiQuinn]

There was a point a few years ago that I would have said Tom Hiddleston but he’s now well into his 40s. But if you want to watch a fantastic spy show with him, I highly recommend watching The Night Manager with him and Hugh Laurie. I definitely came away thinking he’d have been a perfect Bond.

 

[jian]

I really don’t want any accurate version of Bond on the screen ever again, because he’s a dick. Or, more accurately, a monstrous human hand grenade that shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a hero. However, assuming we actually want some solid action film super-spy shenanigans, I vote for Rege-Jean Page.

 

[Piperken]

A a side thought, I'm hoping for a 60s period reboot.

A good story can increase your candidate pool.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So we’ve had a Scot, an Irishman, an Australian, three Englishmen (and an unofficial American, but we don’t count that).

Three weren’t English, two weren’t British (not counting Niven). So those are our precedents.

So we clearly need someone Welsh. Luke Evans?

Some of the usual favourites have aged out now—they need somebody in their 30s so they can get a good 15 years and 5 movies out of them before they age out. That ruels out Idris Elba (52). Henry Cavill is on the outer edge at 41.

There is also precedent for "already to old".

I hear Henry Cavill's moustache is signed up to play Blofeld.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I never really understood actors who did that. Like Harrison Ford wanted Han Solo to die in RotJ (he didn't get his way that time, but he did in TFA). It's not like there's a law that if your character isn't dead, you can be forced against your will to play them again. Frogmarched to the studio and forced to sign up for another film. You can still stop, and new people can take over the role. Everybody else did it.

Actors love playing a good death scene.

 

[payn]

I never really understood actors who did that. Like Harrison Ford wanted Han Solo to die in RotJ (he didn't get his way that time, but he did in TFA). It's not like there's a law that if your character isn't dead, you can be forced against your will to play them again. Frogmarched to the studio and forced to sign up for another film. You can still stop, and new people can take over the role. Everybody else did it.

This reminds my of a hilarious Onion article about Johnny Depp continuing to make pirates of the Caribbean movies because Disney kidnapped his family.

 

[nyvinter]

Protagonist actors almost never get a death scene to their chagrin, while the flipside is that the antagonists always dies and never get to return — which is an issue IMO with larger-than-life film franchises.

As much as I dislike the Caribbean sequels for going all in on Sparrow to the detriment of everything else, them bringing back Barbossa was great.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I really don’t want any accurate version of Bond on the screen ever again, because he’s a dick. Or, more accurately, a monstrous human hand grenade that shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a hero. However, assuming we actually want some solid action film super-spy shenanigans, I vote for Rege-Jean Page.

Am guessing you already know this film, but Dragon Inn by King Hu is supposedly a response to Hu’s disgust at the idea of a secret agent with a license to kill. I like a good Bond movie but Hu’s a pretty interesting contrast (should say Dragon Inn is a different genre so people don’t get the wrong impression)

 

[delericho]

IMO, they're taking an obvious, and wrong, approach to their new casting.

The Daniel Craig films never quite settled on whether they were part of the same continuity as those that went before - "Casino Royale", despite Judy Dench as M, felt like a new start, but as they series went on they leaned more and more on the past. Either way, "No Time To Die" seems to be a pretty definitive end.

That gives them a chance to do something new, and I'd suggest they should embrace it - rather than looking for another young(ish) guy to play Bond for 15 years, I'd instead do a few standalone, more experimental takes on the character.

So maybe you do cast someone older to play the grizzled Bond. Or, hell, see if Dalton would come back for a much older Bond, who for whatever reason has to come back into action but has to deal with the fact that he just can't do what he once did.

Maybe you do a Bond film set back in the 60s. Or maybe one set in the 1860s - let's see how Bond fares when he's not an agent of a dying Imperial power but instead the pre-eminent Imperial power of the age. Or do a film about the naval Commander Bond in WWII - maybe he gets involved in a plot involving Nazis and stolen nuclear plans?

Or, horrors, an American Bond working for the CIA. And, since it's eventually going to happen, this would be a good chance to try out a female James Bond, and see how the audiences react.