Who, in all honesty, would want to be the next James Bond? Daniel Craig confirmed that the role is not the dream job it purports to be when he famously said, in 2015, that he would rather “slash my wrists” than return for a fifth outing. Granted, he did indeed return for a fifth outing, having added in that interview that he would do so only for the money, but the matter was then definitively resolved when his Bond was killed off at the end of No Time to Die. Now the frontrunner to replace him, Idris Elba, has ruled himself out of the race completely, saying that the conversation surrounding it has become racially charged – and not in a good way.
There’s no equivalence, obviously, between becoming a bit tired of being Bond and being racially abused for being in contention for it. One is acceptable, the other just simply is not. Yet Elba put his finger on a wider truth when he added during the chat that the choice of an actor to play Bond is “one of the things the whole world has a vote in”. Not literally, of course. It’s not Eurovision. All the same, James Bond is arguably the most glamorous and high-profile example of the increasing politicisation of casting, whereby the matter of who gets to play what role is decided not by which actor a director thinks is best, but by what the internet thinks the role should represent.
