Besides, “One of the most exciting things about Daniel Craig’s casting is how unexpected it was,” Dyson notes. “Clive Owen was the name that kept coming up in the tabloids at the time, so it’s possible that the next Bond will be someone who isn’t currently even in the conversation.”
The level of fame also has to be right. “They have to be established, but on the cusp of something greater,” Chapman says. “It’s often said that Connery was an unknown, but in fact he was already active in television, and taking meaty supporting roles in films in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Roger Moore was closer to a star, but overwhelmingly on TV, in series such as Ivanhoe, The Persuaders! and The Saint.”
Who fits the Bond profile today? Perhaps someone like Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page, whose stylist barely let him leave the house without a tuxedo in 2021, as the end of Craig’s term approached. Debonairly handsome with a winning comic touch, he would also fit the Broccoli reinvention brief. (Not being white is no obstacle: thanks again to the Sony email hack, we know that in 2014, the studio’s then-chairwoman Amy Pascal was backing Idris Elba to take over from Craig – though at 51, the London-born actor has now aged out of contention.)
At 36, Page would be a plausible new recruit to the 007 programme, with time for multiple sequels ahead of him. Or if his moment’s passed, 39-year-old Theo James – whose starring role in another hit Netflix series, The Gentlemen, might as well have been a Bond audition – could easily pass as a super-spy in training. As would Jack Lowden, the 34-year-old star of Slow Horses. As Chapman points out, however, a conspicuously young Bond was something the franchise traditionally viewed with suspicion.
