From Bale to Burton: The actors who turned down the role of James Bond

By Alexander Larman

Daily Telegraph UK·

23 Feb, 2023 11:00 PM11 mins to read

Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time To Die. Photo / Supplied

Before Taken, Non-Stop and any of the other apparently innumerable action films that Liam Neeson has appeared in over the past 15 years, he could have traded “a particular set of skills” for a licence to kill.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, he suggested that he and “a bunch of actors” were approached by James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli after the release of Schindler’s List made him an A-list star, and, in Neeson’s recollection, asked him a couple of times if he would be interested.

However – for good or for ill – Neeson’s then-fiancee Natasha Richardson, with whom he was shooting the film Nell, said to him “Liam, I want to tell you something: If you play James Bond, we’re not getting married.”

Her rationale was a reasonable one. As Neeson said: “Come on, there’s all those gorgeous girls in various countries getting into bed and getting out of bed. I’m sure a lot of her decision-making was based on that.” Nonetheless, it remains a fascinating “what if” to speculate as to what if he had been cast in the role rather than Pierce Brosnan.

The actor therefore joins the ranks of the second most elite club in 007 history, behind the six actors who have actually played the canonical role: those who were offered the part and turned it down. Here are some of the most interesting – and, in a couple of cases, downright surprising – actors who could have donned the tuxedo and held the Walther PPK, but, for their own reasons, chose not to.

Richard Burton

In 1959, Richard Burton – long before he was defined by his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor – was one of the hottest stars in Hollywood. He had made his name on the British stage and then established himself as a box office draw with the epic swords-and-sandal drama The Robe.

He was approached by Bond author Ian Fleming himself, who was attempting to see if his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, could be filmed, and considered Burton as having the necessary rugged virility.

The Welsh actor turned down the role on the grounds that he was currently playing King Arthur on Broadway, and, as his great-nephew Guy Masterson later said, “[Burton] told me that he thought it was going to be just another movie.”

He was again approached for the part a decade later, after Sean Connery’s departure, but this time he ruled himself out of contention by the time-honoured desire to be paid more money than the producers would offer.

Arguably the greatest actor never to have played 007, Burton would have been an incendiary, captivating presence – although, perhaps, we would never have heard of Sean Connery into the bargain.

Cary Grant

Anyone who saw Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in 1959 would have seen a suave, well-dressed man battling international villains and romancing beautiful women, as well as tossing off well-honed quips: if the role had been an audition piece for Bond, it could not have been a more finely constructed one. Therefore, it was inevitable that Grant would be approached for the role by Bond producers Harry Saltzman and Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli when they were preparing to film Dr No. The latter was confident that Grant would take it, not least because the two were personal friends.

However, the actor was in his mid-fifties when Broccoli and Saltzman were preparing to make the first Bond picture, and so he suggested that he was too old to take on the ongoing commitment that they wished for; he would play the part once, he offered, and then they could move on with another actor if they so desired.

Grant was almost certainly right to be cautious. A greying, ageing Bond was not how Fleming had envisaged the character, and although Grant would undoubtedly have been suave and charismatic, he was more of an interesting “what might have been” than a genuine loss to the role.

James Mason

Ironically, after Grant turned down the part, the next choice for James Bond was his North by Northwest co-star and antagonist James Mason. The Yorkshire-born actor was well known for playing a mixture of romantic leads and charismatic villains, and was widely thought to be possessed of one of the two most seductive voices in cinema (the other, naturally, being Richard Burton).

He turned down the role for similar reasons to Grant, being in his early fifties at the time of being approached and not wishing to be held in a long-term commitment: he was offered to play Bond twice, rather than once, but it was still not enough.

Less of an obviously heroic choice than many of the actors on this list, Mason was subsequently offered – and accepted – the villainous role of Hugo Drax in 1979′s Moonraker, but was eventually replaced by the French actor Michel Lonsdale in order to satisfy the demands of an Anglo-French co-production.

John Bingham with his wife, Veronica Duncan. Photo / Getty Images

Lord Lucan

Today, what happened to Richard Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, is one of the great unsolved mysteries in British history: believed to have murdered his children’s nanny in 1974, he vanished shortly afterwards, and was declared dead in 1999, despite occasional reported sightings of him since.

Yet before he purportedly went in for real-life bloodshed, he was suggested for the role of James Bond by his friend Ian Fleming: the two men often gambled together at the Clermont Club, and Lucan even drove an Aston Martin, to propagate the suave man-about-town image that he desired.

Broccoli was keen on the idea of a real-life aristocrat taking on the role of 007 – ever with a savvy eye to publicity – and offered him a screen test, but Lucan decided that his future did not lie in acting and so turned down the potential opportunity.

Given that we have no record of Lucan appearing in anything else, it’s impossible to say whether he would have been any good, but it nevertheless remains one of the most intriguing “what-ifs” in the entire history of Bond.

Clint Eastwood

The Broccolis have always shied away from casting a non-British actor as Bond, although many have come close over the years: the New Zealander Sam Neill (albeit a man born in Northern Ireland to an English mother), the Croatian Goran Višnjić and the Frenchman Lambert Wilson were all in the mix at one point.

Yet in the late Sixties, when the Bond producers were looking for a new 007 to replace Connery, they considered casting the American star Clint Eastwood, then best known for his appearances in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy.

Unsurprisingly, Eastwood turned down the role, on the grounds both that he would have felt uncomfortable following on from Connery’s iconic portrayal and that he believed that the part should be played by someone British.

There is no doubt that he would have coped with the physicality and suavity required of the role, but the idea of Clint – the Man with No Name himself – doing an upper-crust English accent is a difficult one to imagine.

Michael Gambon

Today, Sir Michael Gambon is regarded as one of the world’s greatest actors, with an enviable CV behind him that includes everything from Dumbledore to award-winning stage work.

Yet he might also have been Connery’s replacement as Bond, if he is to be believed: as an emerging figure in Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre in the late Sixties, he was one of the UK’s most exciting young actors.

However, Gambon also has a reputation for telling outrageous lies to interviewers in order to amuse himself, and so his reasons for turning down the 007 role might have to be taken with a pinch of salt: “I said [to Broccoli] I didn’t want the part because I’m not like him [Bond]. I haven’t got nice hair and I’m a bit fat and he said, ‘well, the present James Bond doesn’t have any hair ... it’s a wig’.”

Never as classically good-looking as his peers, Gambon would nevertheless have been an intriguing, offbeat choice for the role: an actor, rather than a star.

Timothy Dalton

Aficionados of the Bond series often single out Timothy Dalton’s Bond as the closest to the character that Fleming created: jaded, world-weary and hard, but with a core of bruised romanticism underneath the scarring. It’s a shame that he wasn’t given a chance to play the character more than twice, but if matters had been different, he might have had the opportunity.

He was initially offered the role in 1969, but ruled himself out of contention, both because he considered himself too young at a mere 23 to give the part the gravitas it needed.

He was again considered to replace Roger Moore, who was showing signs of disaffection with the part, a decade later, but once again turned it down; it would not be until he accepted the role for 1987′s The Living Daylights that the world finally got a chance to see what this fine actor would do with the character.

Clive Owen

There has been perhaps no actor so closely associated with not taking on the 007 role as Clive Owen. After his tuxedo-clad performance in the crime film Croupier, which became a cult hit, Owen’s suave, saturnine presence was believed to be a perfect fit for the relaunched James Bond. So certain was Hollywood that Owen would take the part that he even appeared in a cameo as “Nigel Boswell, Agent 006″ in the Steve Martin Pink Panther film.

Yet he was never cast in the role of Bond, losing out to Daniel Craig, and it remains another intriguing speculation as to why he did not take the job.

It has been suggested that, like Burton, he asked for a share of the profits and was turned down, or alternatively that he simply did not want to assume the typecasting associated with the role.

In any case, Owen was able to declare in 2014 that “Bond was the best thing that never happened to me”, showing an absence of regrets.

Dominic West

Today, Dominic West is regarded both as one of our most versatile actors and an entertainingly candid interviewee, forever beguiling journalists with unguarded remarks. However, one subject that he has never been especially open about is why he did not play James Bond in 2005; it has been suggested that his audition was very strong, but did not wish to stand in the way of Pierce Brosnan.

He was characteristically amusing about the circumstances in which he attempted to get the part – “Apparently all of the other candidates were turning up in a tux – as if dressed in full-on James Bond garb. So I went to my audition in an old pair of jeans and a tatty T-shirt. I thought I’d try to be different and go for the nonchalant look” – and anyone who has seen him play the likes of McNulty in The Wire and Richard Burton in the drama Burton and Taylor will know that he has the smouldering charisma (as well as the humour) to pull off the role.

Yet he’s only 53 still – might it not be impossible that he could have another crack at it? We shall see.

Christian Bale

Christian Bale might have taken on two of the most iconic roles in popular culture – those of Batman and Bateman – but he missed the chance to add a third “B” to the list when he turned down the 007 gig.

Barbara Broccoli was sufficiently impressed by Bale’s performance as the murderous Patrick Bateman to suggest that the Bond role was “his for the asking”, but Bale – an actor who has never played the Hollywood game without a conspicuous degree of reluctance – was not interested.

He described the “very British” franchise as one that he had no interest in participating in, and loathed the Bond character, saying that he represented “every despicable stereotype about England and British actors”.

For good measure, he declared, post-Bateman, “[I have] already played a serial killer”. Given what a nightmare for the studio and producers a reluctant Bond would have been, it’s probably a relief that Bale never gave into Broccoli’s entreaties.

But he would have been a fascinatingly angry, violent 007: so much for the 12A rating for his films, one imagines.