The unknown actor who rejected an “unbelievably terrible” 1985 offer to play James Bond
It worked the first time, and it definitely didn’t work the second time, which might explain why a relative or complete unknown hasn’t been cast as James Bond since the 1960s.
The reasons behind Sean Connery’s hiring made sense at the time: Dr No was introducing a character to the cinematic masses for the first time, and with a pre-emptive plan already in place for the actor to grow into the role over several movies and a number of years, they had the chance to define the character.
Ironically, 007 ended up defining Connery just as much as he defined the role, but it’s hard to know whether the franchise would have taken off the way it did had one of the bigger, busier, and more in-demand contenders, like Cary Grant or Richard Burton, not turned it down.
Nobody knew who George Lazenby was when he replaced the original vintage for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the experiment was an abysmal failure, and the only reason people know who Lazenby is today is that he played Bond, with the second big-screen 007 accomplishing fuck all else.
Since then, every actor to step into the tux has had at least some body of work behind them. Roger Moore had The Saint and The Persuaders!, Timothy Dalton was vastly experienced on stage and screen, Remington Steele and Mrs Doubtfire‘s Pierce Brosnan was a familiar face to American audiences, and Daniel Craig had been working constantly for almost a decade and a half.
Playing cinema’s most iconic secret agent absolutely took each of their careers to new levels, and afforded them the opportunity to dine out on the residual fame for the rest of their days, but it wasn’t as if anyone with at least a semi-decent knowledge of film or television had no clue who these guys were.
With the greatest of respect, the same couldn’t be said of Andrew Clarke, an Australian who worked exclusively in his homeland, almost always in soap operas, before his performance in the 1985 miniseries Anzacs suddenly put him on Cubby Broccoli’s radar as Moore’s potential replacement. Before he had a chance to wrap his head around it, he’d been screen-tested and presented with a contract.
The downside was that it was a ten-year contract and would effectively give Eon Productions dominion over his present and future prospects. “I said, ‘Look, make it double the money and halve the years?'” Clarke recalled. “They said, ‘Nuh, you’re on the next plane out of town.'” Just like that, he was out of the running, all because he refused to sign his life away for a decade.
He “couldn’t accept it on those terms,” but as far as Eon was concerned, it was non-negotiable. Between his hypothetical Bond films, his paymasters “could hire me out to any studio they liked and pay me a small wage while they took whatever from the studio,” and since the offer he’d been presented with was what he called “just unbelievably terrible,” there was no other choice but to say no.
