We’ve been expecting you, Mr Bond. It’s been seven years since Daniel Craig tossed the tux and officially announced his departure from the role, and five years since the last film, No Time to Die. During that time, the identity of the next James Bond has become nothing short of an international obsession – but now auditions have finally begun, with the second round set for August. Callum Turner is the supposed frontrunner, with Harris Dickinson and Jacob Elordi following close behind. But who will get the gig? It might be worth asking the one person who knows more than anyone about how to choose the perfect 007 – Debbie McWilliams, who cast the last three of them. She’s emphatic about the rumoured names. “I don’t want to see any of them as James Bond.”
McWilliams, now 74 and retired from casting, was at the heart of the Bond franchise for 40 years, from 1981’s For Your Eyes Only to 2021’s No Time to Die. Top casting director Nina Gold, who found stars for Game of Thrones and The Crown, is now in the role, but McWilliams has worked on 13 of the 25 Bond films, first with legendary producer Cubby Broccoli, who co-founded the franchise, and then with his daughter Barbara. She cast Timothy Dalton (the intense Bond), Pierce Brosnan (the suave Bond), and Daniel Craig (the edgy, blonde Bond). Outside of 007, she also happened to “discover” Daniel Day-Lewis, plucking him from obscurity in 1985 for his breakout hit My Beautiful Launderette, and actually thought he’d have made a great Bond: “He has that stature and enigma, but it’s so not his thing, he’s such an intellectual, he would have driven himself completely round the bend.”
For McWilliams, sex appeal and fame aren’t important when it comes to the perfect Bond. In fact, fame is a hindrance – so it doesn’t help to have starred in a zeitgeisty drama like Euphoria or married a pop superstar in Sicily. “It is absolutely essential that he retains a total enigma,” she tells me, cradling a coffee in a south London cafe. Both Bond the character, and the person playing him, have to have an unknowability, she says – and that’s why none of those touted names will work. “I don’t want to see any of them as Bond because we now know so much about them,” she says of Turner and co. “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.”
Clearly, McWilliams took her mission very seriously, but she has a wicked sense of humour; as she reels off anecdotes, her eyes roll in exasperation and she hoots with laughter. Naturally, though, decades in the industry have given her a tough exterior, and she is a fairly impenetrable chamber of secrets. She jokes, several times, that she can’t spill too much gossip or she’ll “get sued by Amazon” – Jeff Bezos controversially acquired creative control of the franchise in February 2025, shortly after McWilliams retired.
McWilliams was drawn to Dalton, Brosnan and Craig because they were fairly under the radar. “Timothy and Pierce weren’t particularly well known,” she says. “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.” For the next Bond, McWilliams wants “to see somebody who is completely out of the blue”.
She was unimpressed, then, when a few hours after it was announced that Amazon had taken the reins on 007, Bezos tweeted to the masses: “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?” It raised her hackles. “That’s not how you cast a film, Jeff!” she says now.
If McWilliams had asked the world who should play Bond, Craig would never have been cast, and we’d never have had one of the best Bonds of all time – someone who swerved expectations and brought a raw, rough, bleeding, dangerous darkness back to 007. “He was such an unpopular choice,” says McWilliams. “Nobody supported it. Not the studio. Not the director.” She describes the press conference announcing him as the star – where he arrived via a Royal Marine speedboat on the Thames, in a sleek suit and a life jacket – as “completely disastrous”. “I’ve never seen anybody look as uncomfortable as Daniel did that day. It was awful. And all these reports came out, that he couldn’t drive, he couldn’t do this, he couldn’t do that, and I have a theory that this totally spurred him on. He thought, ‘I’m going to show you bastards,’ and he did. And everybody went, ‘Oh my God, isn’t he wonderful?’” She chuckles. “So don’t ask the people who they want, because they won’t know.”
And how was it for McWilliams, bearing the burden of the most scrutinised decision in cinema? “Oh, I couldn’t give a damn,” she scoffs. Though she is suspicious that journalists were rooting through her office bin. She used to read the papers and think, “Some of this is a bit too accurate and I don’t really like it.” There was one particular reporter about whom she wondered: “Is he tapping my phone?”
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It helped that the weight of every decision was shared with Barbara Broccoli, who has now let go of the franchise but who elegantly saw it through a golden period, and was always a thoughtful custodian of the character, seeing the potential in Craig when few others could.
The sense of ownership that people feel over Bond in the UK, and all over the world, has only intensified over the decades. For some, the attachment is so extreme that they actually think they are Bond. “Men from every walk of life, of every shape, size, and whether they have hair or not, have thought they were James Bond,” she says, recalling all the letters and emails she received over the years. “It didn’t matter that they’d never acted. I wish somebody would do a documentary about why guys have this curious notion of themselves, but they all do!” she hoots.
“There was one actor who harangued me, I won’t say who that is, but mostly they were wannabes. Or mums sending pictures of their sons in a dinner jacket. Or there was one guy who went, ‘Hello, I’m a watch salesman in Dubai, so I’m very much in that circle…’” She widens her eyes in disbelief. “Like, really? I did keep an awful lot of these emails. I won’t tell you what the title of that file was. There were naked pictures as well…”
She won’t tell me who came close to the role – “I could never possibly say!” – but a lot of celebrities wanted to secure their place in the Bond universe, too. “We went through a phase of the most ridiculous people getting in touch, like Michael Jackson,” she says. “Madonna managed to creep in” – cue a huge eye-roll – “and oh, actually no, there’s somebody else who I couldn’t possibly tell you.” Did Trump ever get in touch? “Can you imagine? I’m sure he thinks he’s perfect for it.” (When auditions for the next film were first announced in March, the White House did actually tweet a picture of Trump as Bond, holding a gun.)
In fact, McWilliams rarely tended to cast Americans, because of all the cosmetic work – she “hates phoney teeth” and insists “people need character”.
There are many actors who’ve reportedly turned the part down over the years, from Michael Gambon (who apparently felt he was not good-looking enough) to Liam Neeson (whose girlfriend and later wife Natasha Richardson allegedly said she would not marry him if he took the role). And heavy is the head that wears the crown. Infamously, after filming Spectre, Craig said he’d rather “slash his wrists” than play Bond again. He then went on to star in his fifth and final outing, 2021’s No Time to Die, in which Bond winds up very much dead in a massive, sacrificial explosion. “I think perhaps the cheque that was dangled in front of him might have had something to do with that,” laughs McWilliams. “But what Daniel did, well, they all have to, is throw themselves in the whole physical aspect of it. It’s incredibly hard work and everybody’s broken things. They give up two years of their life, they have no personal life, and they work morning, noon and night. It’s not for everybody.”
There have been moments where actors who have accepted the role have “wavered slightly”. “They’ve had to be assured that all will be well,” she says, alluding to both the fame and the work the role brings. “It’s probably the toughest job that anyone’s going to have to do in the acting world, excluding perhaps Tom Cruise.” (In the Mission Impossible films, the actor has variously ridden a motorbike off a Norwegian cliff edge, strapped himself to the side of a flying military plane, and held his breath under water for six and a half minutes.)
Some of the most fun McWilliams had on the job was when she was casting other roles in the franchise: the villains, Ms, Qs, Moneypennys and the rest. She loved selecting Mads Mikkelsen as Casino Royale baddie Le Chiffre, he of the bleeding eye. The Danish actor wasn’t her first pick for the role – she had a French star all lined up – “but, poor boy, one of the American studio people said they couldn’t understand his accent, even though he’d screen tested and been with a dialogue coach and all the rest of it. She just said, ‘No, we’re not having it.’” The actor is apparently “very well known in France”.
McWilliams had been keeping an eye on Mikkelsen for a while and was struck by his extraordinary range. She heard he was in Prague near the production, got him to a meeting, and cast him then and there. “I rushed off to introduce him to Barbara, and she said, ‘Get him in costume, get him in hair and makeup, and get him on the set now.’ He didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. We took him down and (director) Martin Campbell, between takes, goes, ‘Oh, hi, you must be Le Chiffre.’ And that was that.”
Eva Green, who played tragic double agent Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, was, McWilliams says, “a controversial choice”. “I championed her from the beginning but everyone else felt she had yet to prove herself. She had to screen test twice before she got the job. I loved her performance but thought the costume department and hair and makeup tried to make her look older than her years, which didn’t help her. It wasn’t until later in the film that you saw the real Eva.”
She hates the term Bond girl, shuddering when I mention it. “It’s just so demeaning, isn’t it?” she says. “Back in the grim old days, when it was bikini shots and things, maybe that’s what you would call them, but they’re actresses. I looked back on a few of the old films the other day and I was astonished at the inappropriateness of some of the things that were passed as seemingly OK, you know, the age difference between Roger Moore and some of his leading ladies. That wasn’t right. But over time, the female roles became much more important, and they were more their own people.”
Though she’s pleased there are now more progressive roles for women, McWilliams agrees with recent comments from Idris Elba – who was heavily linked to the role for a period – that the character shouldn’t be made “woke”, aka a woman or a person of colour. “It’s how Ian Fleming wrote it,” she says. “Why would you want to change that? They haven’t changed Harry Potter to Alice Potter or to a different ethnicity. That’s how it was written and that’s how it should remain, I believe.”
She says changing the gender or ethnicity of Bond was never a discussion in the rooms she was in, but they did flip the gender of M when they cast Judi Dench as the spy chief in 1995’s GoldenEye. “I had said, ‘Well, you know that the head of MI5 is Stella Rimington,’ and Barbara went, ‘Judi Dench!’ and I said, ‘Barbara, be realistic.’ Anyway, I called her agent and she was in the office the next day.” Dench “felt a great affinity towards M” because, as a student, she had lodged in Bernard Lee’s house, who had played M through the Sixties and Seventies.
At the moment, the future of the franchise and what Bezos’s Bond will be like remains somewhat of a mystery. “He did die at the end of the last one. So how do they get out of that? I don’t know,” muses McWilliams. While she’s impressed by director Denis Villeneuve, she says that “the one, gigantic missing element of the next one is the presence of Barbara Broccoli. She lives and breathes Bond and it’s in her DNA.”
The million-dollar question, then: who would be McWilliams’s next pick for Bond? “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” she scolds me, clamping her lips shut and shaking her head. “As if!”
