28th October, 2024 in Entertainment

Casting the impossible: The search for James Bond

By Robert Sellers

The search for an actor to play James Bond did not start with the journey that ultimately led to the monumental casting of Sean Connery in 1962, but a full three years before in 1959 when 007 looked like making his cinematic debut in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. After years of hawking his books around film studios in England and Hollywood, with no takers, 007’s creator, Ian Fleming, teamed up with a young maverick Irish filmmaker called Kevin McClory and together formulated a plot that saw Bond take on nuclear terrorism.

It was during Fleming’s meetings with Paul Dehn, an early candidate to write the screenplay, that the subject of who to cast as Bond first arose. In a letter dated 11th August 1959 to his friend Ivar Bryce Fleming announced, ‘Both Dehn and I think that Richard Burton would be by far the best James Bond!’ It’s a fascinating suggestion, and undeniably the first recorded statement by Fleming about who should play his hero. Years later Fleming would champion David Niven as Bond, a very traditional English actor and a million miles away from the wild Celtic image and brooding manner of Burton. And what a Bond a pre-Cleopatra/pre-Elizabeth Taylor Burton would have been, before vats of vodka and a heady dose of disillusionment frayed his edges beyond repair.

This is but one of a myriad of alternate Bond universes that The Search for Bond, the new book from film journalist Robert Sellers, throws up. It is where Patrick McGoohan stared back at Eunice Gayson across the green baize of a casino table in Dr No, where Burt Reynolds drove the underwater Lotus Esprit or indulged in banter, Smokey and the Bandit-style, with Sherriff J. W. Pepper, or Lewis Collins kicking Michael Gothard’s car over a cliff. But all that was never to be, and maybe it was for the best. After all, the actors the producers finally did cast as Bond have been arguably the perfect choices for their era. Can we visualise another actor other than Moore in The Spy who Loved Me or Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights?

Daniel Craig’s departure as Bond left the producers in the same dilemma as when Pierce Brosnan was earlier dispensed with. There is no obvious candidate to replace him. It seems that pretty much every British actor who can walk in a straight line and owns his own tux was being touted for the role in the press, so many names have been mentioned: Idris Elba, Tom Hardy, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Tom Hiddleston, Aidan Turner, James Norton, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell, Luke Evans are just a few. By the time this book is published we may know the answer as to who the producers have chosen. He will join an illustrious and exclusive club. More people have walked on the moon than played James Bond. As 007 contender Neil Dickson has so humorously suggested, maybe they should all get their own badge.