“I thought it’d be great”: the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie banned from casting Sean Connery
It’s common knowledge that the idea of bringing Sean Connery back into the James Bond fold to make a cameo appearance in Skyfall had been under consideration at one point, but that wasn’t the first time those conversations had been held.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the long-running spy franchise, the producers contemplated reaching out to the retired 007 to gauge his interest in ending his self-imposed sabbatical from the silver screen to play Kincade, the gamekeeper of the titular estate, in a nod toward the saga’s storied past.
Common sense prevailed in the end, with the brain trust agreeing that it would reek of stunt casting and could potentially suck audiences right out of the movie, which it would, with Albert Finney instead getting the nod to lend support to Daniel Craig and Judi Dench in the billion-dollar hit’s unintentional homage to Home Alone.
A decade previously, though, the prospect of a Connery cameo had been floated, and it probably would have been easier to persuade the grizzled Scotsman to do it, since Pierce Brosnan’s Die Another Day was shot before the infamous League of Extraordinary Gentlemen left such a bad taste in the Academy Award-winning veteran’s mouth that he banished himself from Hollywood forever.
You can see why it was shot down so quickly, although it would have answered one of Bond’s most unanswerable mysteries. Ever since Connery first bowed out as 007, theories have suggested that there’s a reason why the continuity between the secret agent’s adventures has always been treated as fast and loose: because James Bond isn’t a person, it’s a codename.
That obviously doesn’t apply to Craig’s five-film stint, which was treated as a self-contained series in itself, but fans have nonetheless spent decades positing that all 25 of the mainline Bond films are connected, not by the main character, but by the moniker, with the ‘James Bond’ handle being passed down from generation to generation.
Director Lee Tamahori wanted to make it official, only to face resistance from everyone above his pay grade. “I proposed that for this movie!” he revealed at the time. “I thought it’d be great: Bond receives a message to go to Scotland, where he meets Connery, who tells him, ‘I was 007, like yourself. Let me tell you something, young fella. You’re supposed to die on the job. But I got out. I had enough of it.'”
It sounds a bit shite and anticlimactic, to be honest, but it’s not the worst idea that’s ever been floated for a Bond flick, and some of those even made it onto the screen. “I thought the audience would have loved it,” Tamahori reasoned, and it would have been a neat little Easter Egg that cleared up the debate over whether or not Bond was a solitary human being or an idea.
On the other hand, Eon Productions, the stewards of 007 who ruled the property with an iron fist until they took Amazon’s money and ran, had other ideas. “Everyone thought it was too dangerous a concept,” the filmmaker offered. “Something to do with not having two 007s in one movie.” It would have been very wink-wink, but then again, that was basically Die Another Day in a nutshell, albeit not in a good way.
