Making the Strong Case for Bond

The speculation regarding whether or not Daniel Craig would continue playing 007 apparently ended at last month’s UK premiere of The Brothers Grimsby. Mark Strong, star of Grimsby and long-time friend of Craig’s (he’s godfather to Strong’s eldest son), confirmed the rumor by letting slip that Craig had, finally, “come to the end of his Bond time.” In the time that’s followed, the pundits have inevitably contributed their respective two cents on who’d make the ideal replacement. They’ve trotted out the usual young, handsome and white suspects: Michael Fassbender, Toms Hardy and Hiddleston, Aidan Turner. So far, so business as usual.
Despite the fact that they were at the premiere of a film in which Strong plays a shit-hot superspy, Strong’s revelation about Craig came about not because the journo conducting the interview thought Strong might make a good 007. It didn’t occur to said reporter to inquire whether the man standing before him would even consider the role. Instead he asked what a number of journalists have asked Strong before: whether this perennial Hollywood bad guy would ever consider playing a future Bond villain. Even the Bond producers appear to have flirted with the idea—at one stage, Strong was rumored to be Spectre’s big bad. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody yet that Strong could, however, be one of the best choices around for the main role.
Let’s back up a little bit. As a bald man in the midst of middle-age, of course Strong doesn’t fit the mould of the classic James Bond type. But after Craig, the mould has changed. Thanks to him, Bond no longer necessarily has to be an immortal constantly regenerating, Doctor Who-like. Previous Bond movies may have acknowledged that Bond was a man out of time, but no Bond film until Skyfall would establish that 007—and the actor playing him—was prone to aging and physical dilapidation. Craig has left Bond an older man, creakier and with a closet full of skeletons. Not in an unintentional, Roger Moore in A View to a Kill way; Bond now looks and acts older because he’s meant to.
In Skyfall and Spectre, this idea that Bond could grow old and rusty like one of us lent proceedings a paradoxical freshness. Craig’s Bond was more grizzled, more vulnerable, more lived. To recast the role now with a younger face would seem like going backwards. It would be like restarting the franchise again, after Casino Royale already rebooted just a decade ago. If producers stick with this new, mature Bond, they rather get to keep exploring the old man Bond angle introduced by Craig and Sam Mendes. And if they do decide to stick with it, they already have a perfect replacement. In Mark Strong, they have an actor who looks like both the classic Bond and Craig’s older, wiser but no less brutal 007.