The woman who cast the last three James Bonds is not impressed with the names currently circulating for the role.
Debbie McWilliams, who shepherded the 007 franchise's casting from 1981's For Your Eyes Only through Daniel Craig's final film, No Time to Die, in 2021, told The Independent on Monday that the rumored frontrunners are simply too well known. "I don't want to see any of them as James Bond," she said, referring to Jacob Elordi, Callum Turner, and Harris Dickinson.
McWilliams has been responsible for some of the most consequential casting decisions in franchise history, selecting Craig, Pierce Brosnan, and Timothy Dalton for the role. Her central argument for the next Bond mirrors what made those choices work: none of those men were household names when they were cast. "Timothy and Pierce weren't particularly well known," she said. "Daniel had had a career in independent films and a fairly colourful romantic life beforehand, but he wasn't a household name, and that helps enormously."
The problem with Elordi, Turner, and Dickinson, she explained, is the volume of public information that now surrounds them. "I don't want to see (Dickinson, Elordi or Turner) as Bond because we now know so much about them," she said. "We want to know as little about them personally as possible, because that's what spies are. We don't need to know where he goes shopping or who his parents are, or where he lives. We never want to see him at home. And a vital element of the whole thing is his job description. He's licensed to kill, and we have to believe that he can do that. If you don't, then you've lost the audience."
Her preferred approach is to find someone "completely out of the blue." That quality, she argued, is essential to making Bond believable. "It is absolutely essential that he retains a total enigma," she said.
McWilliams will not be part of the next film's casting process. That responsibility falls to Nina Gold, known this year for her Academy Award nomination for her casting work on Hamnet, one of the first such nominations in Oscar history. The new Bond film is being directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Steven Knight. McWilliams acknowledged she could not share any inside details about the new production without risking legal trouble.
Gold has not made any public statement about casting. No official announcement has been made about who will play Bond.
