Who will be the next James Bond? Few people are better placed to weigh in than Debbie McWilliams, who cast the actors who played 007 for four decades. Speaking at a packed talk on Friday at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), she stopped short of handicapping specific contenders — names like Callum Turner, Jacob Elordi, Idris Elba and Harris Dickinson have been floated — but she had plenty to say about what the role demands.
McWilliams began her career in 1972 and has worked on more than 100 feature films and television productions. She is best known for casting the last 14 Bond films, helping to shape some of the most memorable performances of the past four decades. Daniel Craig — whose final outing as 007 came in 2021 — was among her picks.
Asked point-blank who the next Bond will be, she was characteristically direct. “I neither know, and I have no opinion,” she said. But she warmed to the subject as the conversation, moderated by Variety senior editor Leo Barraclough, developed.
On whether Bond could be non-white or a woman, McWilliams was unequivocal. “No, I don’t think so. Ian Fleming wrote a character, and that’s the character that stays.”
Whatever the next Bond looks like, one quality is non-negotiable. “Part of his job description is licensed to kill. So you’ve got to think that he could pick a gun up and shoot you,” she said. “He’s got to have a kind of threat about him.” Pierce Brosnan, she noted, didn’t quite have that — “but he embodied a different side of him. He was very good looking and suave, and all the rest of it.” Craig, by contrast, “changed that somewhat in that he was much tougher.”
Her big-picture conclusion on the search for the next Bond: “There’s no set rule. It’s whoever fits the bill, frankly, and it will be different for different directors and different producers — and it’s about to change dramatically.” That change is now in the hands of Amazon MGM Studios, which in February 2025 struck a deal with longtime franchise stewards Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson to take full control of the Bond character and its IP.
McWilliams offered a candid account of how Craig came to be cast. “It took a long time,” she said. “I scoured the world.” Initially, “nobody was particularly interested” — and Craig himself was “quite reluctant” to take the role. The turning point came when Broccoli saw him in the 2004 thriller Layer Cake and asked to meet him.
She also revealed the thinking behind one of the franchise’s most inspired casting decisions: bringing Judi Dench in as M. “Traditionally, the role had been played by a man,” McWilliams recalled, “and I said in a meeting, ‘You do know that the head of MI5 is now a woman — Stella Rimington.’ And so Barbara went, ‘Okay, where’s Judi Dench?’” McWilliams had her reservations — Dench was “at the height of her classical career” — but the actress was in the room the next day. “She was absolutely thrilled to be asked.”
The audience was also treated to a surprising confession: “I’ve never read a James Bond book in my life.” Her casting decisions, she explained, were always based on the scripts alone.
On the subject of AI, McWilliams was blunt. Asked about AI “actor” Tilly Norwood, who recently landed her first role, she said: “I can’t bear the thought of it at all. I think it’s the death knell of the whole film industry.” She conceded, however, that younger generations are more open to it. “We have to embrace it. People say it’s going to make a huge difference — that it’s the industrial revolution of filmmaking. But how it’s going to work out, I don’t know.”
On #MeToo, she was equally direct: “It was horrific what used to go on.” But she expressed cautious optimism that things have genuinely improved on set and in casting rooms.
McWilliams also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Casting Directors Association at the festival, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the art and craft of casting.
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