Lewis Collins: The British actor who was deemed “too tough” to play James Bond
James Bond has a licence to kill, so any actor who plays him has to look committed when they pull the trigger or whip out a space laser. This is the bare minimum. Bond villains might be weirdly chatty, but they are not easy to kill. 007 has to be believably dangerous to pull off all those ridiculous fight sequences, whether in a nuclear reactor, a volcano, or on the ocean floor.
Every new generation of the character is different, so there have been varying degrees of menace over the years. Daniel Craig’s was arguably the hardest motherfucker of the bunch, an emotionally closed-off lone wolf who seems more like a marine than a suave secret agent. Sean Connery could also qualify. He leaned into the humour of those first handful of movies, but there was always an edge to his charm. He was also, it should be noted, the person who Paul Newman called “one of the toughest men on the face of the earth”.
The least threatening Bond has to be Roger Moore. ‘Threatening’ just wasn’t the tone of that era of the franchise. He’s a charming playboy with charisma to spare, but he is hardly intimidating, especially when he starts throwing karate chops. That said, he could muster a pretty cold stare when the time came to off someone.
The Bond producers have considered dozens of actors for the character over the years, from Cary Grant to Christian Bale. The ones who lost out on the opportunity were rejected for a host of reasons. Daniel Pilon was too young. Trevor Howard was too old. Peter Snow was too tall, and Oliver Reed was too controversial. However, out of the dozens of contenders, only one was turned away for being too tough.
You wouldn’t think that Lewis Collins was destined to be the most intimidating almost-Bond to ever read lines for the Broccoli family. Born in Cheshire in 1946, he kicked off his career in style when he won the ‘Most Beautiful Baby in Liverpool’ contest at age two. As a teen, he took up rifle shooting, songwriting, and hairdressing, and was even in contention to replace Pete Best as the drummer for The Beatles at one point. Instead, he became an actor, first conquering the stage and then breaking into film and television.
He landed his most prominent role in 1977 with the espionage TV thriller The Professionals, in which he starred opposite Martin Shaw and Gordon Jackson. The agents on the show didn’t just have a licence to kill; they had a licence to use “any means necessary”. It was a much grittier, more modern series than the Bond franchise at that point, but Collins’s character, Bodie, had plenty of parallels to 007. He was, after all, a witty womaniser.
The Bond producers started thinking about him for the 1982 film Octopussy after Roger Moore expressed his intention to retire. Moore had already appeared in five instalments of the franchise and was starting to feel like it was time to move on. Clearly, however, producer Cubby Broccoli wasn’t ready to take the spoof-adjacent Moore era of the character in such a drastic direction. Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only are about as far from The Professionals as contemporary on-screen interpretations of the British intelligence service could be. In contrast with Moore, Collins was indeed “too tough” to be Bond.
