Steven Knight says that the new James Bond has now been chosen – and he should know, since he’s writing the script.
It’s definitely beginning to sound as though we’re building up to some sort of official reveal. Mere days ago, Gary Oldman said, with what seemed like confidence rather than guesswork, that the new James Bond has been chosen.
Now we have someone else saying the same thing – and it’s none other than Steven Knight, the chap who’s writing the James Bond 26 script.
Appearing on Radio 4’s Today show yesterday (8th September), Knight was asked whether or not he’d written his Bond script without knowing who was going to play the new 007.
“It’s a bit of both,” Knight said, as quoted by The Independent. “It does make life a bit easier if you know who that person is, but you also have to write that character, not the actor.”
Knight then grew rather terse when he was asked at what point he learned who the new Bond actor would be. “I’ll refer you to my previous answer,” he said.
A couple of weeks ago, Page Six floated the story that a relatively low-profile British actor, Jack Barton, was a frontrunner for the Bond role. One of Barton’s earlier credits was SAS: Rogue Heroes, on which Knight was writer and showrunner.
Knight has said that the new Bond will have a revised SAS origin story; could this connection have endeared Jack Barton to the film’s producers and director, Denis Villeneuve?
We’ll have to wait and see. Gary Oldman says he’s backing his Slow Horses co-star Jack Lowden as the new Bond. The other candidates are said to be Callum Turner, Jacob Elordi, Paul Mescal and Harris Dickinson. Or maybe the next 007 will be a surprise name that hasn’t emerged in any of these stories so far.
More as we get it.
