Bond producer had to fight to hire Daniel Craig, says casting director

By Morgan Jeffery

Published: Tuesday, 04 October 2022 at 12:00 am

James Bond casting director Debbie McWilliams has suggested that Daniel Craig would never have been cast as 007 if not for producer Barbara Broccoli “forcing the issue”.

Speaking at the BFI’s ‘In conversation: 60 years of James Bond’ event, McWilliams – who has cast every Bond film since 1983’s Octopussy – claimed that Broccoli had to fight for Craig amid uncertainty over his hiring.

“There was the most extraordinary outrage when Daniel was cast,” she said. “The press that he got was so awful.

“Really, he didn’t have many people who wanted him in the first place – if it hadn’t been for Barbara absolutely forcing the issue through, he wouldn’t have been James Bond.”

However, McWilliams suggested that the initial backlash in some quarters to Craig’s casting – which of course dissipated upon the release of 2006’s Casino Royale – “drove him to rise to the occasion”.

In fact, Casino Royale co-writer Robert Wade argued that Craig’s experiences off-screen in some way reflected Bond’s own baptism of fire in the film. “It sort of tied in… what Daniel went through in that process, it really tied in with what the script was asking of Bond,” he said.

“We’d made a Bond that was not perfect, he wasn’t better than everyone else, and he kept getting knocked down but the point was he kept getting up and I think that’s what Daniel did when he was having that terrible reception – he just carried on, got up… and he won. So it was his story and the character’s story all tied together.”