The James Bond movie that almost made Roger Moore quit: “I was horrified”
Roger Moore was the third James Bond to grace cinema screens, and his tenure is mostly remembered for its light-hearted nature. Moore never seemed to take things too seriously when playing the super-spy, and audiences responded to it. He played Bond seven times, more than any other actor, although he later admitted to hanging around in the role a bit too long. Indeed, as he got older and Hollywood’s expectations changed surrounding on-screen violence, it led to him almost wanting to quit one of the movies.
When he started out as Ian Fleming’s iconic spy, Moore’s light attitude to the role was just what the doctor ordered. He liked the idea of Bond being a charming, globetrotting spy who would fall into bed with a Bond girl before he’d consider getting into a gunfight with a villain. In fact, he was always uncomfortable with the violence inherent to the character and especially disliked how closely associated Bond was with firearms.
In 2001, he said, “I played every role tongue-in-cheek because I don’t really believe in that sort of hero.”
As quickly as his second go-around as Bond – 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun – the series was already pushing its level of violence. For instance, in the film, Bond twists the arm of lead villain Scaramanga’s mistress and actually threatens to break it if she refuses to cooperate with him. It was a scene director Guy Hamilton insisted on, much to Moore’s chagrin.
In his memoir My Word Is My Bond, Moore confessed: “That sort of characterisation didn’t sit well with me. I suggested my Bond would have charmed the information out of her by bedding her first. My Bond was a lover and a giggler, but I went along with Guy.”
It was A View to a Kill that truly upset Moore, though. Coming in 1985, it was Moore’s final outing as Bond, and the gun violence in the picture angered the star so much that he felt like quitting. You see, in the film’s big finale, Christopher Walken’s Nazi villain Max Zorin mows down scores of his own henchmen with an Uzi, and this level of bloodlust disgusted Moore.
In his book, Moore wrote: “I was horrified on the last Bond I did. Whole slews of sequences where Christopher Walken was machine-gunning hundreds of people. I said, ‘That wasn’t Bond, those weren’t Bond films.’ It stopped being what they were all about. You didn’t dwell on the blood and the brains spewing all over the place.”
Interestingly, Moore’s distaste for gun violence wasn’t just a squeamishness about how it was depicted on-screen. He had terrible experiences with firearms in childhood, so much so that, over the years, he actually became an anti-gun advocate. In fact, he even found it hard to look at pictures of himself with Bond’s iconic Walther PPK.
In his memoir, he revealed that a gun once exploded in his hands when he was a child, causing him to lose his hearing for a few days. Then, when he was a teenager, a pal accidentally shot him in the leg with a BB gun. It made him so nervous around guns – even fake ones – that when he had to fire prop guns on Bond sets, he would clench his eyes shut.
Ultimately, Moore’s discomfort with firearms and his part in what he perceived as society’s glorification of them weren’t quite enough to make him regret playing Bond. But he did admit to the BBC, “I regret that, sadly, heroes in general are depicted with guns in their hands, and to tell the truth, I have always hated guns and what they represent”.
