The Trump-Russia saga has given us many things – DNC email hacks, #TreasonSummit, Maria Butina – but it may yet give us something else: a Russian Bond villain. Though film production is a a slow-moving affair, it looks as if life may well imitate art when the next 007 film – currently known only as Bond 25 – is released, with a “charismatic, cold and vindictive” Russian seemingly set to be 007’s principal antagonist.
According to a casting call sheet obtained by well-established unofficial Bond fan site mi6-hq.com, producers are looking to cast a a Russian actor in a male leading role (though producers are “also open to suggestions of actors from the Balkans or similar”). The list of characteristics – “charismatic, powerful, innovative, cosmopolitan, bright, cold and vindictive” – suggests a villain, while fluent English is required, crucial for that “I kill you, Mr Bond” dialogue.
The casting sheet also suggests the film is in the market for a “very striking” and “strong physical” female lead role, also Russian; but her characteristics – “intelligent, brave, fierce and charming … witty and skilful. A survivor” – suggest she will be more sympathetic, possibly some sort of double agent. And in apparent accordance with the ethnically diverse casting of past Bond-movie henchmen – Oddjob, Baron Samedi – producers appear to be looking for a Māori actor with “stage combat skills” to play an “authoritative, cunning, ruthless and loyal” character.
More often than not, Bond villains accord with where global menace is perceived to be swirling most darkly – hence the run of maverick industrialists in the 1970s, or the Murdoch-esque telecoms magnate Eliot Carver in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies.
Bond 25 has been in development at least since March 2018, when Danny Boyle confirmed that he and his Trainspotting collaborator John Hodge were working on a script. Boyle was subsequently confirmed as director, as was the return of Daniel Craig in the central role.
No plot details have yet been revealed but Boyle and Hodge have plenty of real-life material to work with. Spy Anna Chapman was deported from New York in 2010 as part of a prisoner exchange; Russian military intervention in Ukraine began in 2014 and led to the annexation of Crimea; then came the DNC email hack during the 2016 election and the recent unmasking of another Russian spy, Maria Butina, with connections to the NRA.
For a film series so closely identified with the cold war and east-west tensions, Bond has had remarkably few Russian villains. Its most famous baddie, the cat-stroking terrorist mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who appeared most recently in 2015’s Spectre, hails from behind the iron curtain, but is Polish. High-profile Russian baddies include dagger-booted Rosa Klebb (From Russia With Love) and bomb-happy General Orlov (Octopussy). The most recent was Robert Carlyle’s pain-impervious hitman Renard in 1999’s The World Is Not Enough.
Bond 25 is due to be released on 25 October 2019.
