The rumor mill has been running for almost two years, but it is still not clear who will inherit Daniel Craig as James Bond. What we know about it: Which actors didn’t play the double-zero cop even if they had the chance?
Clint Eastwood was offered the role to replace Sean Connery, but the role was not down-to-earth enough for him. Cary Grant thought he was too old for James Bond, and Liam Neeson didn’t want to be cast as an action hero (before the ’96 Hours’ films). Hugh Jackman, on the other hand, wasn’t happy with the new direction the producers wanted to take with James Bond – the ‘Wolverine’ star was briefly in talks for ‘Casino Royale’.
And then there’s Mel Gibson: In an interview with The actor and director (“The Passion of the Christ”) said that he once had the opportunity to play the most famous of all cinema spies. In the mid-80s, Gibson is said to have gone after Connery Roger Moore could become the third Bond actor, but he had good reasons not to accept the role.
Currently, a large part of the ‘James Bond“-Movies included in the Amazon Prime Video subscription:
“I got an offer to do the James Bond films when I was 26, which was about 40 years ago,” Gibson told me . “They said, ‘Hey, we want you to be the next James Bond!’ And I thought about it. I was just in Australia working with Peter Weir [für die Kriegsfilme „Gallipoli“ und „Ein Jahr in der Hölle“, Anm. d. Red.]. I seriously considered it, but ultimately rejected it. Because I thought, ‘Look what happened to poor Sean, he was stuck there for thirty years.’
Of course, Sean Connery has emancipated himself from his Bond image over the course of his career (at least when he won an Oscar for Brian De Palma’s gangster film masterpiece “The Untouchables”), but it took a while for him to get there. After his (temporary) exit from James Bond with the film ‘Diamond Fever’ (1971), there were initially no more major roles, and the acting legend, who died in 2020, publicly had difficulty in various interviews with always being associated only with James Bond .
Gibson wanted to avoid this fate. Although his career is now at a standstill for very different reasons, Gibson was one of the biggest in Hollywood in the 1980s thanks to the series ‘Lethal Weapon’ and the five-time Oscar-winning historical epic ‘Braveheart’ (which he himself directed). and 90s stars – who could play both comedic and dramatic roles, appearing in action films, but also convincing in a romance like “Forever Young”. Would such a diverse range of roles have been possible for him if only everyone had seen James Bond in him?
Instead of Mel Gibson, Timothy Dalton eventually took on the role, but he only played James Bond in two films – before Pierce Brosnan took over. By the way, there is another actor who rejected Bond – and had very understandable reasons for doing so: