The Sean Connery performance that changed James Bond forever
Key roles in long-running franchises are recast all the time, but no matter how good or bad anyone turns out to be, getting there first is always beneficial. Sean Connery set the template for James Bond, and for many, he remains the definitive interpretation of the character.
Having been granted the opportunity to headline Dr No – even if he wasn’t the first actor to play 007 onscreen – Connery was free to tailor the role however he wanted. Each of his successors have sought to put their own spin on Bond, but the original is always going to be dredged up as a point of comparison.
It’s the same for any pop culture icon that cycles through multiple stars over a long period of time, with Michael Keaton’s Batman, Christopher Reeve’s Superman, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein still regarded by a hefty percentage of each character’s most ardent supporters as the benchmark.
One person who wasn’t initially happy with Connery’s casting happened to be one of the most important, though, with Ian Fleming left bristling at his suave secret agent being brought to the screen by a performer he derisively dubbed a “working-class Scot”.
In his mind, Bond needed to be a man of status who carried himself with a certain panache, which is presumably why his number one candidate for the role was Cary Grant. Instead of a ‘Golden Age’ icon and undeniable megastar, Dr No settled on a former milkman and part-time bodybuilder, which wasn’t what Fleming had in mind.
Connery recalls that the literary father of 007 had referred to him as “an overdeveloped stuntman,” with the leading man well aware that “he was not happy with me as a choice”. Dr No didn’t win him over, but From Russia with Love did. The second entry in the globetrotting saga is still one of the best, with Connery now comfortably settled into the part and able to impose more of himself on the character.
Fleming’s hesitations were quickly washed away as Bond battled against the nefarious threat of the SPECTRE organisation, which inspired the author to make a sweeping change to all of his literary works from that point forward.
In every Bond novel penned after From Russia with Love, Fleming made a point of directly referencing the Scottish heritage he’d decided to integrate into the spy’s backstory in tribute to an actor he’d openly criticised as recently as the year before the film’s 1963 theatrical release.
Ever since then, cinema’s most famous secret agent has carried Scottish ancestry on both page and screen, even if it’s rarely been overtly referenced in the moneyspinning franchise. The climactic showdown in Sam Mendes’ Skyfall was the most obvious nod in the half-century since From Russia with Love, with Daniel Craig and Judi Dench retreating to the Highlands for their last stand against Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva.
That being said, despite Connery winning over Fleming to such a significant extent he made Bond’s Scottish background a key part of his origin story, he remains the first and last actor born in the country to take on the role.
