When obvious casting becomes too obvious: the James Bond villain Gary Oldman turned down
No one turns to the James Bond cineverse for subtle character studies, no matter how hard the final Daniel Craig instalments tried to pivot towards soul-searching. And nowhere is all this lack of subtlety more blatant than in the villains who have, over many, many decades, provided more mirth than terror.
Like the theme songs, the villains have been very hit or miss. There is everything from Michael Lonsdale’s Hugo Drax, a wickedly goateed space lord with an army of PVC-clad stormtroopers at his disposal, to Mathieu Amalric’s Dominic Greene, whom the actor modelled after the benign malevolence of Tony Blair. For the most part, these performances are overblown to the point of caricature, and no Bond film is complete without them.
Some actors seem like obvious fits for Bond villainy, and most of them are named Christopher. Christoph Waltz, Christopher Walken, and Christopher Lee were all delivering pitch-perfect auditions for their Bond roles for decades without realising it. But there are some actors who fit the mould just as flawlessly, who still haven’t graced us with their presence. Chief among them (aside from the late Vincent Price) is Gary Oldman.
Consider that stretch he had in the 1990s. Dracula, Léon: The Professional, Air Force One, The Fifth Element – whether he was sporting a top hat and sleazy moustache or rocking cinema’s most unforgivable goatee and comb-over combination, Oldman epitomised the type of over-the-top evil that makes Bond villains tick. So, why hasn’t he ever played the bad guy in a 007 film?
It turns out that the producers did actually extend an offer to him because they are not, in fact, ignorant. At some point in the pre-Craig era, Oldman was approached for a villain role but turned it down. In a 2024 interview with the BBC, the Oscar winner didn’t provide many details about why.
“The Bond villain didn’t ring with me,” he said simply.
The job offer would presumably have come sometime during the Pierce Brosnan era, though anyone who saw Sid and Nancy might have recognised his flair for depravity as early as 1986 when Timothy Dalton was still wielding the gadgets. The Brosnan period is more likely, though, which narrows the options considerably. The Irish star only made four Bond appearances, and one of the villains was a woman (played by Sophie Marceau).
The options, then, are Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye, Eliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, Renard Zokas in The World is Not Enough, and Gustav Graves in Die Another Day, and while there aren’t many people who would argue that the Brosnan era was the best chapter in the Bond franchise, some of its performances were pretty serviceable, particularly Bean’s and Pryce’s.
That said, if Oldman was to turn any of them down due to the quality of the character, Alec Trevelyan seems like the most obvious contender. This is a man with a hopelessly contrived and convoluted backstory involving his Soviet parents’ collaboration with the Nazis, a refused defection to the UK, and a murder-suicide. He works for MI6 but also wants to blow up the world.
If this was in fact the role that Oldman was offered, it’s no wonder it “didn’t ring” with him.
