Double or Nothing author on 007’s future: “Bond is always what we need it to be”

Kim Sherwood has her say on what might be next for the iconic spy franchise on the big screen.

By Patrick Cremona

Published: Thursday, 25 May 2023 at 12:00 am

More than 18 months have passed since Daniel Craig bowed out of the Bond franchise in No Time to Die, but 007 fans are still waiting for news about who might be replacing him as the iconic spy.

All sorts of names including Sam Heughan and Aaron Taylor-Johnson have been mooted as options but despite all the speculation there has been no indication as to when the next actor will be revealed.

But according to Double or Nothing author Kim Sherwood – the first woman to write an official James Bond novel – she has full faith that whoever ends up getting cast will be the right man for the job.

“I mean, I’m glad that it’s Barbara Broccoli who has to decide and not me,” she recently told RadioTimes.com during an exclusive interview, before revealing she’s still too focused on the end of Craig’s tenure to think too hard about what comes next.

“It’s really interesting, I know that a lot of Bond fans are really hungry to know what’s next, but or me, I’m still mourning Daniel Craig’s character,” she said.

“At the moment, I find it hard to imagine where it can go next because I’m still, I suppose, within the end of that story that they told so beautifully. And I guess that’s why we have these breaks, isn’t it? Because over time that begins to recede and then a new story opens up.”

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She added that it was rather difficult to predict what will come next because of the way the character has evolved over the years – while still retaining the essence of Ian Fleming’s original creation.

“When you look at Sean Connery’s Bond, say compared to Roger Moore’s Bond or [Timothy] Dalton’s Bond, we have these big differences not only in how the actors portrayed them but in how the movies moved with their times.

“So if you look at Dalton’s Bond, for example, that’s made during the AIDS crisis. So there’s far less casual sex in those films, a really different attitude to sex. So things like that influence the films, and I think we don’t know what Bond will become until we start to change.”

She concluded: “The future will determine what Bond is because Bond is always what we need it to be. We don’t yet know what that is but it’ll be interesting to see how things unfold socially in the next few years and how that influences that.”