“I’ll send you to MI6”: the actor Judi Dench thinks would be a brilliant James Bond
The speculation over who will take the helm as the next 007 has been swirling ever since Daniel Craig announced his retirement from the franchise after 2021’s No Time To Die. The actor played the role in five movies spanning 15 years, starting with Casino Royale in 2006. Originally, he only intended to do one film, but with its enormous success, he was roped into a much longer commitment that put his portrayal on par with his predecessors, Sean Connery and Roger Moore.
Craig is a tough act to follow, having cemented his place in the Bond pantheon by taking a serious, emotionally battered approach to the role that still sizzles with 20th-century ideals of masculinity. Many names have been floated to be his successor, including Nowhere Boy star Aaron Taylor-Johnson (anyone who can convincingly play John Lennon can surely fill the shiny Derby shoes of 007), Crazy Rich Asians heartthrob Henry Golding, and the man who is intensity personified, Tom Hardy. There was even speculation of a gender swap when Lashana Lynch appeared in No Time to Die in what seemed to be a soft launch of the next Bond.
Conjecture aside, however, there is one actor who knows exactly who should play 007 and has a lot more authority on the matter than the average Bond enthusiast. Dame Judi Dench, who, in addition to winning an Oscar for eight minutes of screen time in Shakespeare in Love, played the head of MI6 in no fewer than eight Bond movies spanning 20 years. Perhaps no other actor is better positioned to pass judgement on who the next 007 should be, and her choice might be the most popular potential Bond of them all: Idris Elba.
“Oh I think he would be a brilliant Bond,” Dench told an interviewer. She met Elba under the most inauspicious of circumstances when they starred together in Tom Hooper’s spectacularly disastrous live-action adaptation of the musical Cats. In the film, Dench plays Old Deuteronomy, the matriarch of a feline clan. Elba plays Macavity, a teleporting con cat sporting a fur coat and a beat-up fedora. Despite the stacked cast and beloved musical numbers, the film was one of the most widely panned major releases in recent memory. Questions abounded about the cats’ anatomy, the plot, the music, and the special effects. It was, in short, one large question mark followed by an exclamation point, and not in a fun way.
Somehow, behind the green motion-capture suit that all the actors wore, Dench saw 007. At one point during production, when Elba’s character asked Dench’s character to send him to the nebulous version of cat heaven known as the Heaviside Layer, his co-star quipped, “No – I’ll send you to MI6.”
Sadly for Dench and other Elba fans, the Luther actor has since taken himself out of the running once and for all. After his name emerged as the top candidate for the role, Elba was met with a small but vocal group of racist commenters who threw a tantrum at the idea of James Bond being Black. Even author Anthony Horowitz, who wrote several Bond novels after the death of Ian Fleming, said that Elba was “too street” to play the quintessential British spy.
With Elba out of the picture, the odds on who will be the next 007 are as uncertain as ever. But given that the field is wide open, might I suggest that the producers throw caution to the winds and bring back the old CGI onesie? A cat version of Mr Bond might be the new phase of the character we’ve all been waiting for.
