Some of us at The Playlist were positively overjoyed at the announcement that Peter Morgan, writer of “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon,” would co-write of the new, as-yet-untitled James Bond movie. His co-writers remain the team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who have written a bunch of Bond recent movies. (Morgan seems to be filling the “high-minded co-writer” slot previously held by moralistic hack Paul Haggis, who was supposedly paid $4 million for little more than script doctoring the mediocre, “Quantum of Solace.”)
Well, almost as soon as Morgan was announced as the writer, rumors began to fly, mostly jokingly, that Michael Sheen, who has starred in a number of Morgan scripts (including, well, “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon”), would be the badguy. And, according to notoriously unreliable British tabloid The Daily Mail, Sheen would play legendary Bond baddie Blofeld. Blofeld, of course, was the one-eyed, bald-headed evildoer who lovingly stroked his white cat while attempting to destroy the world.
He was the visual basis for Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil in the “Austin Powers” films. Evil’s persona and cadence infamously came from SNL head honcho Lorne Michaels.
Another reason why this is total hogwash: the new Bond’s can’t legally use the Blofeld character. As CHUD points out, the legal thorniness would most likely rule out Blofeld appearing in the sequel. (This is why SPECTRE was changed to Quantum in the last movie.) So even if the Daily Mail rumor wasn’t complete and utter bullshit, legally they couldn’t even pull it off. And does anyone even think that they’d already know who the badguy was, even before the script was written? I know these movies have a quick turnaround, but c’mon.
Maybe there will be a Blofeld-like character in the new movie, but even that seems somewhat far-fetched, considering the new movies relative commitment to realism, not to mention the over-exposure of the Blofeld character through Myers’ parody. Still, Sheen as a badguy doesn’t seem like a completely horrible idea. Then again, we did recently see him as a bloodthirsty werewolf in the third “Underworld” movie and that was just laughable. – Drew Taylor