The hunt for the next James Bond is on, with names like young Hollywood stars Callum Turner, Jacob Elordi and Harris Dickinson swirling as rumored frontrunners. But not if Debbie McWilliams has any say in it. The longtime “James Bond” casting director who found the last three iterations of the agent, including Daniel Craig, has yet to be impressed.
“I don’t want to see any of them as James Bond,” she told The Independent on Monday.
McWilliams bore the responsibility of casting the past three men to take on the 007 moniker, tapping Craig, Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton for the role in their respective years with the franchise. McWilliams saw all of those men through their Bond careers, shepherding the franchise’s casting from 1981’s “For Your Eyes Only” (starring Roger Moore) to 2021’s Craig finale “No Time to Die.”
The key, McWilliams said, to casting these men for the role was that they were all relatively unknown by the time they got the part. For the next Bond, she likewise wants to see someone “completely out of the blue.”
“Timothy and Pierce weren’t particularly well known,” McWilliams 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.”
McWilliams will not return to cast the next James Bond, directed by Denis Villeneuve and penned by Steven Knight. That job goes to Nina Gold, a prolific casting director who this year became one of the first Best Casting nominees at the Academy Awards for her work on “Hamnet.” Though Gold has yet to make an official statement (and McWilliams too restrains from sharing any inside info lest she get “sued” by new “Bond” owner Amazon), her predecessor shared a piece of advice: “It is absolutely essential that he retains a total enigma.”
“I don’t want to see (Dickinson, Elordi or Turner) as Bond because we now know so much about them,” McWilliams explained. “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.”
