Ian Fleming Pixel Pushers/Getty Images/Horst Tappe/Hulton Archive/Getty Images/ Sketch: courtesy Logo text He should be young. He should be Black. He should be a woman. He should be trans. Just about everyone has an opinion about what sort of actor Amazon should hire for the next James Bond. But before any rash decisions get made, THR has uncovered a lost 007 casting note that Denis Villeneuve may want to take a glance at. It’s from 1958. And it was written by no less an authority than Ian Fleming.
To be sure, the Bond creator offered many clues as to what the character looked like in his 14 novels. A SMERSH dossier on Bond in From Russia With Love describes him as 6 feet tall, 168 pounds, with black hair and blue eyes and a thin scar down his right cheek. In two other novels, Fleming makes a point of noting a resemblance to crooner Hoagy Carmichael.
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But the closest Fleming ever came to describing Bond outside the books was while working with cartoonist John McLusky in the late 1950s on a comic strip for the Daily Express. Fleming even commissioned another artist to draw a 007 portrait based on his notes to inspire McLusky, then embarked on a long, typewritten correspondence with the illustrator fine-tuning the look. Only a few pages of that nearly 70-year-old exchange have survived — and were recently excavated by McLusky’s son, Sean, who’s been selling his father’s art through London’s A Gallery — but they do offer one critical piece of casting advice that seems as pertinent today as it did back then.
“In general,” Fleming wrote, dismissing one of McLusky’s drawings of 007, “I think we should avoid giving Bond an American-shaped head and a duck’s haircut.”
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This story appeared in the Aug. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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