Now that the next James Bond actor is on the brink of being unveiled, it may be a good time to take a proper look at the prior 007 with clear eyes. Because, while the reputations of all the previous Bonds have ossified over the years – in chronological order: sexy, wooden, camp, boring and silly – the Daniel Craig era is finally coming into focus. And it turns out that he was actually the angel of death.
Obviously anyone who saw No Time to Die knows this, because that film ended with Bond being exploded in a hail of missile fire. But according to Judi Dench’s new memoir Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, it was also Craig’s decision to kill off M, too.
In it, Dench tells of the moment she learned that her character would be sent to the glue factory in Skyfall. “I was taken to the Wolseley restaurant by Barbara [Broccoli], Michael [G Wilson] and Sam [Mendes] – I don’t think Daniel Craig was there – and they outlined the plot and told me they were going to bump me off,” she writes.
“It was reported in the press that I’d cried when they told me I was being replaced,” she continues. “Of course I didn’t cry. Why on earth would I cry after 20 glorious years and eight Bond films – which, by the way, is one more than Roger Moore, the longest-running 007 to date.” However, the key detail is this: “Apparently, it was Daniel’s idea to have me killed.”
Now anyone playing Bond needs to have a fair amount of ice in their veins. He is a character, after all, who goes around the world murdering people without a glimmer of remorse. But there’s a vast difference between shooting an extra in a badly fitting Soviet uniform and being the guy responsible for putting Dame Judi Dench out of work. Could you do that? Could you look at lovely Judi, with all her trees and champagne and anecdotes, and decide that she isn’t going to be in any more James Bond films? Could you? Even though for a fair stretch of those films she was the only good thing in them? Could you? I couldn’t.
Daniel Craig, on the other hand, doesn’t give a stuff. By his own reckoning, it was his idea to make sure Bond ended up dead, asking Broccoli: “Can I kill him off at the end of the fourth one, please?” on the way back from the Berlin premiere of Casino Royale in 2006. And now we’re learning that it was his idea to bump off Dench’s M as well.
You have to wonder if Broccoli vetoed any of his suggestions at all. Maybe he wanted to fire Q out of a cannon into a log chipper. Maybe he wanted to trade the Aston Martin for a Ford Cortina. He did, after all, spend a lot of No Time to Die in a comfortable sweater, so who’s to say? I have a feeling that the only red line Broccoli had would be if Craig asked if he could pull a disparaging face as he looks at a Sony Ericsson mobile phone. But that’s about it.
On the one hand, this is great. By being so obsessed with killing off Bond and those closest to him, Craig got to be a true iconoclast – and in any case, at that stage of 007’s long and sometimes dreary history, things needed to be shaken up. Plus, it was Craig’s express wish that he got to tell the whole sweep of Bond’s story, and he undeniably did that.
But he has set a difficult precedent for whoever comes next. Whatever the identity of the next James Bond, be it Jack Lowden or Callum Turner, they will have to figure out a way to up the ante from killing Dame Judi. And surely that’s an impossible task.
How can you top murdering a national treasure? Maybe they could suggest hiring the only person more beloved than Dench, Sir David Attenborough, purely to have him trip and fall beneath the blades of a combine harvester in the next film’s cold open. Maybe they could poison the audience at the premiere. Maybe they could straight up have Bond shoot a procession of puppies at various intervals? Nobody knows, but it’s a high bar to beat.
