The James Bond co-star Roger Moore called a “sex maniac”
To be James Bond is to possess a certain amount of sex appeal. The secret agent is enshrined in sexuality within the books, and that has only been exacerbated over the decades on screen. Roger Moore is one actor who took that part of the role seriously.
Although the defining role of his career came when playing a character who regularly proved irresistible to the opposite sex, Moore was left aghast by the promiscuity of one of his James Bond co-stars.
1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun marked the leading man’s second time donning the tux following his debut in Live and Let Die, with the increasing comedic elements that would soon become hallmarks of the Moore era drawing mixed reactions at the time, even if Christopher Lee’s Scaramanga was praised for providing a suitably formidable nemesis for a 007 still trying to win over the doubters.
However, it wasn’t the movie’s chief antagonist that was labelled as a “sex maniac” by Moore, but his on-screen accomplice. Hervé Villechaize had been acting for almost a decade prior to being cast as Nick Nack, but a major role in a Bond flick was far and away the highest-profile part of his career to date.
The role might not have been the highest profile, but it connected with audiences. Soon enough, Hervé Villechaize would become one of the most famous faces in Hollywood as he occupied screens across the world.
With it came extra attention, something that soured him in Moore’s eyes, at least in the way he described it during a speaking engagement, per The Express. “He was a very small man and he used to touch me and I used to say, ‘Don’t touch me. You are diseased’,” he said. “I wasn’t being cruel about his size, it was just that he was a sex maniac. He had a lust for ladies, unnatural”.
As part of his routine, Moore recalled how Villechaize “would find girls in girly clubs and go with a flashlight, ‘You, you, not you'”. According to the star, the diminutive actor claims to have slept with 35 women in the time The Man with the Golden Gun was shooting between November 1973 and August 1974 across Hong Kong and Thailand.
“I told him that did not count as he paid for them,” he continued. “But he said, ‘Sometimes when I pay they refuse'”. Hardly the most hilarious of anecdotes to share with a room full of people in a career-spanning retrospective, but it was far from the last time Villechaize would let his proclivities get the better of him.
Following The Man with the Golden Gun, he’d be cast as Tattoo in the popular American show Fantasy Island and remain a series regular 130 episodes and a pair of made-for-television movies. However, he was ultimately fired after regularly butting heads with the producers, demanding equal pay to the top-billed Ricardo Montalbán, and repeatedly propositioning women on set, which came after his divorce from his second wife, Camille Hagen, whom he’d initially met while shooting the pilot episode.
Moore clearly wasn’t enamoured by Villechaize’s behaviour on The Man with the Golden Gun, but it nonetheless stuck in his memory for decades after the fact. The Bond man would enjoy many different co-stars in the history of his esteemed career as Her Majesty’s most valuable weapon, but there’s a very good chance that not one of them made as large an impact on his life than Villechaize.
