Despite years of lavish and wishful casting rumors from British tabloids and trusted Hollywood trades alike, a new report claims that Denis Villeneuve won’t even be starting his casting search until he completes “Dune: Part Three” next year. Not only that, but he’ll be looking for an unknown actor ot play the next iteration of James Bond for “Bond 26.”
This time, the news is coming from a VERY respected source of legit Bond news, former Daily Mail reporter Baz Bamigboye, who landed at Deadline and has one of the better track records concerning coverage of the franchise interworkings/development.
His latest contribution to the “Bond 26” talk is doubling down on the idea that Villeneuve, alongside newly assigned producers Amy Pascal and David Heyman, is going to be looking for an unknown “fresh face” actor (maybe, a working newish actor, but not super famous) to play 007, but that search won’t be happening until sometime next year. So, that seems to allude to being cautious about names that have been thrown out there.
Some of those names of “potential contenders” mentioned over the years included Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Tom Hardy, Henry Cavill (to name a few, there had been much much more) and more recently, there has been chatter that Tom Holland (went out of his way to call the rumor “speculation“), Harris Dickinson, and Jacob Elordi, but if this reporting is to be believed (Baz is deeply plugged-in with the acting community and film/theatre industry in London, no real reason to doubt his report) all that maybe should be ignored.
One of the bonsuses of casting an “unknown” is the limited expectations saddled on that person when they’re cast and we have to imagine that given his casting track record, whoever, Villeneuve selects is going to be someone hired for the their acting skills and not just their ability to be a marketable name (Bond has always been bigger than the actor, despite the notion that Amazon MGM Studios needs a HUGE name to play James).
We’ll just have to continue to be patient despite the excitement surrounding the casting for “Bond 26.” Given that we’re months away from that announcement, and that screenwriter Steven Knight has signaled that he hasn’t even started writing a script, even though he’s super excited to get things going, we’re still in the development phase here.
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