It would’ve involved passing the baton to the next generation of spies.
Now that Daniel Craig has officially hung up his 007 status after No Time To Die (which has just been added to Amazon Prime Video, along with pretty much every other Bond movie to date), all eyes are on who will take up the title next.
Tom Hardy has recently been replaced as the bookies’ favourite by Bridgerton breakout star Regé-Jean Page, but we imagine it will be a few years yet before any kind of official announcement is made.
Of course, Bond isn’t the only spy game out there, as Kingsman creator Mark Millar can attest to. Three movies in, including the recently released The King’s Man, this week Millar spoke to The James Bond A-Z Podcast, in which he revealed a project which would have featured Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig.
Millar said:
“Matthew Vaughan who directed Kingsman had this really cool idea, when Sean Connery was still alive, and Roger Moore was still alive. His idea was to do a promotional teaser for Kingsman where you had all the previous Bonds together, all having a toast around the table. [They’d be] talking about a new generation of spies. They had this really cool little idea.
“We actually had a link to everybody. We had like Roger Moore, who was good friends with someone Matthew knew, I can’t remember who it was. Colin Firth was friendly with Pierce [Brosnan], and Matthew knew Daniel Craig for Layer Cake, and somebody knew [George] Lazenby.
“We kinda had all of them. And I think we had a slightly provisional ‘yes’, according to Matthew, I don’t know if this is true, but we had a provisional ‘yes’ from everyone and we were trying to get Connery, and [Matthew] tried to get me to get Connery, because I was Scottish!
“Although I didn’t know him, I called up my mutual friend and he phoned ahead, but Connery was quite ill by that point, and we were told ‘this just can’t happen’. And I said, ‘why don’t we just do what they did in the 1960s and just get Neil Connery, his brother, and just use him if we can?’”
“But it would have been so cool. That would have been great to see those guys actually standing together in real life.”
There had been other rumours through the years that previous Bond actors would return to the franchise, including a 1960’s-set Bond movie starring Pierce Brosnan to be directed by Quentin Tarantino, as well as Connery to play the character in Skyfall that ultimately went to Albert Finney.
Getting all six together would’ve been incredible, and while this didn’t work out for the Kingsman franchise, Deadline has reported that there are multiple more movies and a TV show to come as part of that series.
In the meantime, you can check out our interview with No Time To Die director Cary Joji Fukanaga, who chats about the most difficult scene to film in the movie:
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