Auditions for the new 007 have opened, and the reckons have too … though let’s be fair, they haven’t stopped since Daniel Craig hung up his blue swimming togs.
The odds are shortening and at least one audition has already taken place, which displaced the favourite of the past six months, Dua Lipa’s boyfriend Callum Turner, in favour of Tom Francis.
Sorry, Tom who?
“I’d never heard of him,” says Kate Rodger, New Zealand’s premier entertainment journalist.
But he’s a theatre actor with piercing blue eyes and chops on the boards, and at 26 he hasn’t been imprinted with any other fictional characters.
Rodger joins The Detail today to discuss who’s up for the job, who’s likely to get it, and what the requirements are to don that tux.
“The casting of this is headline news for months and months – we’re obsessed about it,” she says. “And each time it’s been a recalibration on where is Bond going next?”
Rodger says she’s genuinely excited to see who will get the nod for one of the most iconic screen roles.
“If we think about the franchise, that’s over five decades we’ve been entertained by 007,” she says.
“And the fascination, I don’t think, has waned in that time.”
Craig held the title for 15 years which has added to the obsession over who will take his place.
Rodger says a huge number of people grew up with James Bond, whether it was in the movies or the books. Now the franchise has been sold to Amazon which will want some creative control.
“We have an idea or a notion of what Bond is and [Ian] Fleming wrote him as a male character. In my mind I do want Bond to be true to the character – I want him to be male. I think the bigger conversation is, is he reflective of the world we live in now, and does he have to be white?”
Polls show viewers tend to agree: they are not keen on a Jane Bond, but they’re more relaxed on (his) race – and Rodger says she’s ready for a black Bond, her pick being Damson Idris, who starred alongside Brad Pitt in F1: The Movie and is in the Bond conversation.
“He’s got a phenomenal screen presence,” she says.
One absolute requirement for the job, she says, is that you do have to be a good actor.
“Even if we look back through the ages at the hamminess of Roger Moore – and also Pierce [Brosnan] was pretty hammy as well – but of course they could act, and I think the reason this conversation is coming up is purely because I believe that compared with the ’70s our audiences … [we] demand more, we’re a little bit more sophisticated … about what we want.”
One of those on the shortlist for the job is Australian Jacob Elordi who played Elvis in Priscilla and who has just won his first Oscar for Frankenstein. (Only one Bond has not been British – another Australian, George Lazenby – and for one film only.)
“The whole notion of Bond is that he’s British-ish,” Rodger says.
Elordi is 28 which puts him in the right age range for producers wanting an actor who can age with the franchise.
“The Elordi thing feeds into a whole lot of other conversations around an actor being well known for being an actor, but also because he’s dating a Kardashian, or he’s in Margot Robbie’s Wuthering Heights, or Euphoria for that matter.
“He comes with such a branded kind of CV already that how do we leave the ‘Elordi-ness’ of it all at the door?”
Bond’s casting agents are believed to want a relatively fresh face, which is another reason why the odds on Tom Francis have gone up – he could burst onto the movie scene without any baggage – baggage, for instance, that the people’s overwhelming favourite, Henry Cavill, carries in spades. After all, he’s really Superman.
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