#james-bond-casting

#james-bond-casting

"[Bias] is that thing that stops you being regarded as a person and makes you something smaller. With my accent, I've had that experience where I'm suddenly no longer a person with infinite possibilities and potential - I am 'that Scottish person'. I'm reduced to a noise that comes out of my mouth."

I'm categorically not," he said when asked in a recent The Times interview whether he is set to play Voldemort. "Can you make that the headline?" he asked, seemingly keen to make it known far and wide that he wouldn't take on the role.

And don't forget the succession of other dead cert Bonds now banished to the back of the odds market: the long-rumoured likes of Tom Hardy and Idris Elba (both now likely to have aged out of the role); Theo James; James Norton; Josh O'Connor; Harris Dickinson; Bridgerton's Rege-Jean Page; and approximately 5,000 other predominately British actors who have enjoyed box office success/led a successful TV drama/look good in a tuxedo.

Facing the end of his life thanks to an unspecified terminal illness that should have shuffled him off his mortal coil 18 months ago, this Steve bobs around the coast meeting up with crew members (always complaining they need more kit) and actors who are officially dead (Jacobi and Townsend's characters) – not that this means they still can't be cast.

At the time of its 1962 release, however, it shook up the spy genre and unleashed a tidal wave of imitators looking to replicate its box-office fortunes. Most, whether serious stories like The Quiller Memorandum, copyright-dodging rip-offs like 008: Operation Exterminate and Agent 077: Mission Bloody Mary, and parodies like the Vincent Price-starring Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, are long-forgotten. One, meanwhile, is only remembered thanks to its sheer lousiness.

A character in this film in fact, about to go out to the cinema, talks about the importance of seeing the full programme. Griff (played by Derren Nesbitt) leads a trio of robbers who raid a suburban bank just as it is about to shut up shop for the bank holiday weekend. In a horribly cynical touch, Griff poses as a postman to gain entrance using his dead father's old uniform.