Is There a Good Argument for an American James Bond?

You’ve probably had a bit of a weird feeling in the pit of your stomach for the last few days. Something hasn’t been quite right.

Then you saw it, and you realised what your gut had been telling you – that Jeff Bezos tweet, deployed with the air of your father in law returning to the pub table with two more frothy pints of mild: “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?”

Certainly, it’s when I knew. We need to get used to the fact that an American James Bond is now inevitable. Maybe not the next James Bond. But it’ll happen, and you need to make your peace with it. It needn’t even be a bad thing. It would, though, be a big thing.

Certainly, it’s hard not to read Bezos’s post from last week as a statement of intent. Thanks for your service, Barbara. Big Jeff’s at the wheel now. And Big Jeff has just paid top whack for the right to do what he and the creative minds at Amazon think is best.

An American Bond is exactly where a lot of fans’ minds jumped to after the news broke. One of the clearest lines the LA-born Barbara Broccoli has always held is that while Bond could be many things, he had to be British. Though her father Cubby wandered into the Commonwealth and Ireland, he was broadly of the same mind, as was his co-producer Harry Saltzman.

Now with Broccoli and Wilson – both British-American passport holders – out of the picture, the whole calculus of the situation is changed. He doesn’t have to be a 30-something British or Commonwealth actor with some nice theatre credits and a bit of on-screen duffing-up on his CV. He can be anything again.

And let’s not forget that whenever a new Bond has been announced in the past, the Yanks have been sticking their heads round the door of MI6. Burt Reynolds said no in 1970 and regretted it; John Gavin was signed on for Diamonds Are Forever before Sean Connery came back, and later became Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Mexico; James Brolin was in the frame for Octopussy before Roger Moore decided to carry on; New York-born former Tarzan Christoper Lambert apparently sounded too French; Croatian-American Goran Višnjić made the Casino Royale longlist but couldn’t nail an English accent either.

Clearly, these two things don’t necessarily mean an American Bond is nailed on. And it would obviously be insanity to cast an American Bond. You know this. Anyone who has seen a film knows this. The whole point of Bond is that he’s a creature of British post-empire decline. He is mates with exactly one American.

Nor do I think this is inevitable because Bezos is personally going to pick the next Bond, or because Amazon’s creative department is useless, or because Eon was uniquely able to protect what Bond has been. It’s because this is very much in keeping with the creeping sell-off of chunks of Britain’s cultural furniture. Michael B Jordan owns a bit of Bournemouth AFC. Kraft bought out Cadbury’s. Disney co-produces Doctor Who. An American company is turning the BT Tower into a (probably pretty sick) hotel.

Even once you’ve paid a billion quid to get things moving, you’re unlikely to want to break it immediately. But the threads which tied Bond to his post-war origins have been slackening for a little while now. At the moment there’s nothing to suggest some lunk from Iowa is going to fold himself into the DB5. Yet it’s also not unreasonable to fret that without the anchor which was keeping Bond close to these shores, his drift across the Atlantic will soon be complete.

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