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Pick a Bond, any Bond. You could have Sensitive Bond (James Norton), Bridgerton Bond (Regé-Jean Page), Superman Bond (Henry Cavill), Should-have-been Bond (Idris Elba), Pine-effect Bond (Tom Hiddleston)…Yep, ever since Daniel Craig said in 2015 he’d rather slash his wrists than play 007 again – and especially in the five years since No Time to Die ended his tenure – the pack has been shuffled and reshuffled as often as the blackjack cards in Casino Royale. Six months ago, it was definitely Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Just a few weeks ago it was Callum Turner, apparently nailed on. Now reports suggest man-of-the-moment Jacob Elordi has met with director Denis Villeneuve and Amazon executives for Bond 26. Suddenly, the Australian looks like the frontrunner.
Let’s call him Heathcliff Bond. His latest film, Wuthering Heights, has just stormed to number one at the global box office with $82m in its opening weekend – the biggest worldwide debut of the year, and a timely fillip to his 007 credentials. The Oscar-nominated star of Euphoria, Saltburn, Priscilla, and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is demonstrably bankable – more so, certainly, than Turner. If Elordi can sell toxic Brontë passion to multiplexes, he can sell Bond. Easily.
Amazon MGM, now holding the franchise reins after powerhouse producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson stepped back, has already pulled off a big coup appointing Dune director Villeneuve, with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight writing the screenplay. But the final piece will be the most vital.
These things follow a familiar pattern: a rumour surfaces, the bookmakers pile in, the internet goes into meltdown, and overnight an actor finds himself auditioning in the court of public opinion whether he likes it or not.
Elordi wouldn’t be the first Australian to don the tuxedo. George Lazenby played Bond in the brilliant On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. While he was a disastrously vapid Bond, Lazenby’s physical presence – unlike Roger Moore’s – makes him one of the few Bonds who looks like he might actually win those set-piece fights. And his failure certainly wasn’t about his nationality – it was about his inability to convey the darkness beneath the dinner jacket.
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Roguish charm: Elordi in Emerald Fennell’s ‘Saltburn’ (Warner Bros)
Elordi wouldn’t have that problem. His Heathcliff shows that. And at 28 years old and towering at 6’5”, he would become not just the youngest Bond ever but also the tallest. (Watch yourself, Lazenby.) Of course, there will be a backlash and accusations of a desperate pivot from Amazon towards TikTok demographics. But those doubters might want to revisit what Fleming actually envisioned. His Bond was no avuncular martini-sipper. He was “dark, rather cruel good looks” personified – 6ft tall, slim build, with a three-inch scar on his right cheek. In Fleming’s Casino Royale, Vesper Lynd remarks that he resembles Hoagy Carmichael “but there is something cold and ruthless”. This wasn’t a man you’d want to meet in a dark alley. Fleming wanted a “blunt instrument”, someone who looked capable of murder without a second thought. Elordi fits the template.
When Craig was cast in 2005, after paving the way with the steely gangland thriller Layer Cake, the fallout was vicious – too blonde, too brutish, not suave enough. And yet his tenure redefined Bond entirely, stripping away the winking camp and restoring Fleming’s original conception of a damaged man operating in morally murky territory. Elordi’s potential casting suggests Amazon wants to continue that trajectory rather than retreat into the Roger Moore era of raised eyebrows and double entendres.
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Blunt instrument? Elordi as Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Warner Bros)
What Elordi brings – beyond looking like he could bench-press a Bentley – is danger that seems to flow from somewhere hidden. Fleming’s Bond wasn’t just Eton and expensive tastes. Beneath the urbane veneer was an orphan who’d lost his parents in a climbing accident at 11, a man shaped by violence and loss before he ever put on the dinner jacket. Elordi has rehearsed for this: the thuggish animal magnetism in Euphoria, the roguish Oxbridge-educated charm in Saltburn, the savage outsider clawing his way into gilded respectability in Wuthering Heights. And for something that really demonstrates Elordi’s range, look at his Academy Award-nominated performance in Frankenstein – immensely physical, yes, but also aching with a yearning that lends the Creature’s loss of innocence such poignancy. Bond demands that capacity to move through Mayfair casinos with ease while never losing the edge of someone who doesn’t quite belong.
Drawing heavily from Fleming’s earliest novels, the film is rumoured to explore Bond’s origins – his Royal Navy background, his recruitment into MI6, his journey to becoming a 00 agent. This isn’t Roger Moore arriving fully formed in a safari suit; it’s a chance to trace the making of a cold-blooded assassin. For that, you need an actor who can convey both the seduction of power and its corrosive effect on the soul. Elordi, at 28, has the runway to inhabit the role for a decade or even two, to grow with it as Craig did.
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Will it work? What we know is that the films have always been at their best when they’ve gone for the jugular – Connery’s vicious swagger, Dalton’s cold fury, Craig’s brute force. Elordi represents a return to Fleming’s vision of Bond as something even darker and more unsettling – a man who can shift from seduction to violence in the time it takes to mix a Vesper martini. Amazon may well be accused of getting Bond wrong, but Elordi could be just right.