Poor old Daniel Craig. Every interview he ever does brings the same turgid question: “Who do you want to be the next James Bond?” Ever since he quit the franchise in 2021, that query has been pelted at him like rotten fruit at a creaky Elizabethan actor; he’ll probably be answering it until the day he dies. When, 100 years from now, a particularly well-connected psychic manages to summon Craig’s spirit back from the afterlife, you can bet it’ll be this subject on which his ghost is interrogated. And even then, he’ll surely give the same response that he did this week: “I don’t care.”
The problem, for Bond studio MGM and producer Barbara Broccoli, is that many 007 fans are starting to feel the same way. It’s now been more than three years since Craig bowed out as the British superspy, and it feels even longer – the final entry, No Time to Die, having already suffered lengthy delays as a result of creative changes and the Covid pandemic. And, despite feverish reports linking Aaron Taylor-Johnson to the role back in March, no one is any the wiser as to who Craig’s successor will actually be.
Some of those once floated as potential candidates have long aged out of the role – Idris Elba, the heir apparent for a solid chunk of Craig’s 15-year Bond tenure, is now 52, and firmly out of the running – and other hot prospects (Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page, The Witcher’s Henry Cavill) have cooled to an improbable room temperature. The radio silence from Camp Bond has given Britain’s premier action franchise a hard reset, a clean break from the Craig era, which began brightly with 2006’s Casino Royale, but dwindled. For whichever actor finally nabs the role, however, it’s increased the pressure severalfold.
It is, as any Bond fan will know, a rather precarious time for the franchise, existentially speaking. Spy fiction has never been less in vogue in Hollywood. Outside of a couple of obstinate legacy franchises (Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible films; the supposedly still-ongoing Bourne saga), the genre has largely migrated to the shores of television. (See, for example, this week’s The Day of the Jackal on Sky.) Questions have been raised over how exactly 007 can be made fresh once again; a popular but radical suggestion is the idea of a retro-Bond, set during the era of Ian Fleming’s original books. Others have proposed introducing a younger, maybe even adolescent Bond, in the vein of Charlie Higson’s spin-off novel series.
More than this, though, the very concept of James Bond as a character has been thrown into limbo. In the year 2024, Bond endures as a bastion of everything men are supposed to be growing beyond: he’s a symbol of unevolved, womanising machismo. There have, among the public – and, we can presume, within the corridors of MGM – been discussions about ways to detoxify the character. Casting a Black actor as Bond is one much-rumoured way in which things could be shaken up, likewise the (markedly less likely) idea of gender-switching the character. Whoever is cast as Bond, white or not, they will have to bear the weight of this now protracted discourse.
There are certainly times when abstinence is the best policy. To look at another of cinema’s biggest franchises – Star Wars – there is a sense among the fanbase that producers would be better off putting a pin in new projects, allowing some time for curiosity to peak, for anticipation to grow, and to ensure a modicum of quality control. But James Bond is a different story. From the 1960s to the 1980s, MGM was cranking out five or six Bond films each decade. The formulaic nature of the material meant there was no need for the sort of larger-scale world-building or continuity that has derailed Star Wars in recent years. All a Bond film really needs is a good villain, some snazzy locations, fast cars and explosive stunts.
Craig’s most recent outings – Skyfall (2012), Spectre (2015) and No Time to Die (2021) have all suffered from a self-inflicted need for grandeur, exacerbated by the lengthy gaps in between the productions. There is nothing to stop them from making a Bond film every two or three years now. They’d be hit and miss, for sure – but hasn’t that always been the case?
It can only be a matter of time until the studio finally capitulates and anoints its new Bond, but we’ve been saying that for years now. In any case, Craig better buckle up – the 007 question is going nowhere. Which reminds me... who does he think should be the next Bond?
