"Timothy Dalton – The Private Bond" (a Starlog Interview)

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[I’ve been digging through old film magazines and thought this article might be of interest.]

Timothy Dalton – The Private Bond

The British actor takes a very personal view of his role as a superspy with a “License to Kill”

by Dan Yakir (Starlog No. 145, August 1989)

Timothy Dalton is wearing a bathrobe over his tux, to protect himself from the chilly Mexican evening. He’s relaxing in the lobby of the grandiose Gran Hotel, which serves as the selling for a Central American casino and headquarters of drug czar Sanchez—the man he will pursue to the bitter end in License to Kill, the new chapter in the James Bond saga.

In this $36 million production, directed by Bond veteran John Glen, the indomitable 007 embarks on a personal mission to avenge the maiming of his friend, ex-CIA agent Felix Leiter, and the brutal murder of Leiter’s wife-to-be during their wedding. Bond becomes so obsessed with punishing the culprit, Sanchez, that he is dismissed from Her Majesty’s Secret Service by “M,” and his license to kill is revoked.

At 41, Dalton seems to have made his screen character very much his own, but he refuses to become complacent. This is one actor who takes his job very seriously.

STARLOG: Let’s talk about Bond as he appears in this film; it seems he reveals a private side that he hasn’t shown before.

TIMOTHY DALTON: Mmm…You surprise me. How does this happen?

STARLOG: Well, maybe we’ve seen the public Bond before—the man on a mission—without dwelling on his inner motivation and the private pain.

DALTON: I think the story is based on something personal. I mean, he’s still the same man, of course, and I would like to think that you saw quite a few glimpses of the man himself in the last film, for example, because I believe that’s important. I wouldn’t say the private Bond. It’s still the same man, only here he’s driven less objectively and professionally than he might be if he was working on a mission or a job. It comes from a personal source, but of course he’s still Bond.

STARLOG: What was the special challenge for you doing the character in this particular film, given the plot and motivation?

DALTON: [Laughs] I don’t know that I could give a comprehensive answer to that. Almost every scene you do is difficult; every scene you do has a challenge, which is finding all the right bits of the jigsaw so that when you finish the movie, they will fit together and you’ll have a proper picture of the man that fits with the film.

STARLOG: How different is License to Kill from The Living Daylights?

DALTON: It’s a different kind of film—more straightforward in its motive. Daylights operated on quite a few levels of deception and intrigue, which I don’t think we’ve got in this story. There’s a fundamental course for aggression here and lots of blocks to the fulfillment of that. License to Kill is about vengeance, retribution, setting a wrong—a personal grievance—right, but it broadens and expands and takes on a larger perspective. Ultimately, as in all good Bond films, good does triumph over evil on a better basis than just one of personal revenge. I mean, one’s own scope, one’s own awareness of how he’s behaving is enlarged and is brought back to something that is much more calculating and striving for a good end.

It’s very difficult for me to talk about it, because when you’re in the beginning of the film, it’s one thing to have broad strokes and outlines in your head, but day by day, through the process of work with your colleagues, influences change, colors change, textures change. It’s difficult to judge until it’s finished.

STARLOG: What kind of relationship does Bond have with Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell)? Is he still as monogamous as in The Living Daylights?

DALTON: Yeah, I would pretty much say so. In general, it’s faithful to the spirit of Ian Fleming’s books, as I think are most of the Bond films. It usually starts with a woman giving him some trouble or problem or he’s getting tangled with some woman he perhaps doesn’t want to be tangled up with, but through the story, getting to know her better and perhaps either endangering himself in order to protect her or finding that she sometimes protects him and through their [eventual] mutual knowledge of each other, coming much closer, which I think is classic Bond.

STARLOG: In this case, what is the nature of the relationship?

DALTON: She’s sort of a freelance out-of-jobber for either American government agencies and/or drug smugglers, whatever; at this moment in time, she happens to be on our side and we both end up together going for this man Sanchez, who’s our villain, a drug baron.

STARLOG: Would you say Bond has more of a partnership with her than with the females in the previous movies?

DALTON: I wouldn’t say there’s more of a partnership. no! I mean, I think there was quite a good partnership between Ursula Andress and Sean Connery in Dr. No or with Diana Rigg [and George Lazenby] in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Certainly, you could say in The Living Daylights, although the girl wasn’t innocent, they developed into being—however haphazardly—partners; she certainly helped him. I don’t want to give the story away; there are complexities to it that shouldn’t be revealed.

STARLOG: How did you get along with Carey Lowell?

DALTON: Carey is a lovely person. She’s extremely bright, responsive, very believable, and very good to work with. I think she has all the potential to be right up there in the forefront of the Bond leading ladies. Also, Talisa Soto, who is—

STARLOG: The “Bad Girl"?:

DALTON: She’s not a bad girl, just a tangled girl, very attractive, very nice, something of a victim caught up in this affair.

STARLOG: What kind of an opponent is Sanchez, as played by Robert Davi? What kind of a Bond villain is he?

DALTON: Before I speak about Davi, I would like to mention that this movie will be a harder, grittier, darker, and perhaps more realistic film than we’ve seen before. Alec Mills, who’s lighting it, and the very texture of the story, both guarantee that. It’s certainly much together. And Davi as a villain is not among the “pantomime villains.” He’s an actor of a very deep and real power and the work that I’ve seen him do so far is filled with a sense of danger—it’s being played realistically. Much of the film looks very moody and strong and dirty, which I like. One of my three favorite villains anyway was Gert Frobe in Goldfinger. I thought his performance was magnificent in a very wonderful film. Davi, too, is moving towards something fairly unique in the Bond films, and I hope it works.

STARLOG: He’s a worthy opponent?

DALTON: Oh hell, yes—and it goes beyond the nature of the character or the actor playing the character. I don’t want to give the impression that one is moving away from tradition. He is still quite a monster and a villain in a world scale—his operation is global and destructive [Laughs heartily]. Well, sometimes one would prefer to be playing the villain!

STARLOG: Since fans have responded favorably to your portrayal of Bond, do you feel a greater ease playing him?

DALTON: No. I was gratified that so many people did enjoy The Living Daylights, but the response has not been 100 percent, because everybody has their preconceptions of how James Bond should be. But overall, there has been an overwhelming sense of pleasure at the direction the last movie took and how it was received by the audience. But it doesn’t give one greater ease at all!

STARLOG: You don’t see Bond as an old friend you can just slip on?

DALTON: Not really, because it’s not quite as simple as that. One has to make it work again and again every day. I have to shoot new scenes and new plotlines and make every moment feel right. That’s the problem. It has nothing to do with whether you feel happy, content and relaxed. It has to do with what your imagination is telling you, what your responses are telling you. However good your previous work has been, the new one is always the new one—it has its own demands.

STARLOG: Perhaps you face a bigger challenge than the previous Bonds, because they set the mold for themselves and then stayed with it. But you’ve already made a change from The Living Daylights to License to Kill.

DALTON: Yes, definitely. But you can’t expect every story to be the same. When people talk to me about Roger Moore and Sean Connery, you can’t compare the two; you can only say which films you prefer.

STARLOG: But they stayed as themselves within the movies that they made; there was no dramatic evolution.

DALTON: I know, but the movies themselves had the evolution. You could see the evolution between Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. You could see development, but they were still within a similar area. But even Connery’s last film was completely different from, say, From Russia With Love. They were two different entities and therefore perhaps required different kinds of performances. The more the films developed into technological extravaganzas and light-hearted comedy spoofs, the more removed they became from the early Bonds. In License to Kill, too, I hope you see a different Bond.

STARLOG: Do you feel you’re taking a risk that way?

DALTON: I suppose so. But it would be boring to be the same all the time, to have the same story. I don’t wish to abuse the word, but there is a…formula, which has to do with Bond versus the villain, with good vs. evil also in Bond himself. That’s all formula. but within it, there’s scope for variety and the more the better.

STARLOG: Arc the Bond movies moving toward a more classical, neater, cleaner structure? They seem to trim all the extras.

DALTON: I think so. I would like to think that, because my favorite Bond movies were the early ones, and they did capture the spirit of the Bond books well. I can read those books today and still get totally involved and keep turning the pages and I can look all those early films and really enjoy them. I don 't know if you could ever call Ian Fleming’s works classics, but in the sense you intend, yes. I would like that.

STARLOG: How bound are you to Bond?

DALTON: No more than Harrison Ford is to Indiana Jones. One must remember that for all the pleasure and entertainment and success it can bring, and for all the hard work that goes into making it for 18 weeks, a Bond movie is only two hours every two years! That’s not much in the scale of things! There have to be other things in between. How could I be an actor, how could I be the actor I am, if I did nothing else?

STARLOG: So, you make unusual choices, like Hawks?

DALTON: It’s probably the most enjoyable experience I’ve had making a film. Hawks is about two men who are facing a premature death , since they have cancer—and that puts life into focus. It’s provocative, a serious comedy, a black comedy. It deals with ordinary people who are going slightly crazy because of the situation they’re in—it’s somewhat life-affirming, challenging, aggressive. And it says: Fight for your life; don’t give in!

STARLOG: Has it affected you in any way?

DALTON: It’s certainly the kind of film that can make you realize that survival can be up to you—up to a point. It certainly reminds us how we take life for granted, and how we shouldn’t, because it’s precious.

STARLOG: What motivates you to act in the first place?

DALTON: That’s something I think about constantly, because it has to be for a purpose, it’s not just self-indulgence. People often say, “Well, it’s just the way I express myself.” That’s no good, that’s narcissistic, juvenile. You work to express the piece, because you believe the piece has value and that it can be communicated to other people who will see something new of life because of it. You must believe that it will in some small or big way make a difference to their lives.

Shakespeare, perhaps more than any playwright, explored the ultimate reaches of the human emotion. Eugene O’Neill is, to me, the greatest playwright of the 20th century, but when you enter the back of a dark theater in Sydney or London or New York and see the way people react to Bond, that counts, too. Perhaps it’s not on the same scale of things, but it’s definitely worthwhile!

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While on the topic of Licence to Kill, here are excerpts from another article from the same period…

James Bond’s Final Mission?

by Lee Goldberg (Starlog 146, September 1989)

“You can’t disappoint the audience, but you can’t give them what they expect,” explains Michael Wilson, co-writer (with Richard Maibaum) and producer of Licence to Kill…

Wilson concedes that he, and longtime 007 producer Albert R. Broccoli are “running scared,” attempting to maintain the formula while also “being slightly ahead of our time.” But how long can James Bond remain a cultural icon, and a money-making machine, and not become an anachronism? Wilson admits they “worry about it all the time.”

For one thing, they must keep a close eye on the international scene. In the post-Cold War thaw of Watergate, feminism, glasnost and AIDS, they must pick their villains and their stereotypes carefully.

“We have to be aware of the world situation and what people will accept as a ‘loosely-based on reality’ sort of plot,” Wilson says. The Red Threat just won’t wash today, not with Gorby-mania in the headlines. “I guess people are more hopeful today than ever before and don’t want someone undermining that hope.”

…“Timothy gives us a different direction to go in,” says Wilson. “I think the films with Roger emphasized his talents. For Timothy, a gritty, more reality-based piece is the way to go. Giving him one-liners won’t play to his strong suit. He plays it fairly straight.”

Dalton gives producers the chance to show a darker, more violent side to Bond who, in this film, “is thrown out of the service, and he has lost the objectivity he normally has, and that makes for a rather impassioned, exciting film.”

…“This film’s thrust is that Bond loses his professional objectivity because of his vendetta,” Wilson says. “In a sense, it’s the awakening in him of the realization that when he loses his objectivity, he begins to make things worse for himself.”

Bond also lost a wife (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) and went looking for vengeance (Diamonds are Forever), but those events aren’t touched on in this film , which obviously tackles similar themes. “There is a reference, but very indirect, to Bond being married before, and it’s sort of bittersweet,” says Wilson. “We never really saw Bond go for revenge before. It wasn’t a very developed idea in those films.”

Although grittiness doesn’t lend itself to the series’ more cartoonish elements, the producers have compensated by emphasizing the stunts, some left over from other movies. “I have stunts I haven’t even unpacked yet,” Wilson jokes. “The truck chase in this film is something John Glen has wanted to do for years.

“We find our stunts where we can. Normally, we think the stunts up in-house or go with a person we’ve worked with before. For instance, the stunt with Bond and the seaplane was done by Sparky Green, the fellow who directed our air unit in the last film. He gave me this stunt and it blended perfectly with the narrative. which was fortuitous, otherwise it would have gone on the back shelf.”

…the Writers Guild strike drove a wedge between Wilson and Richard Maibaum during the film’s writing. They worked together on the outline, which was turned in just before the strike. Wilson wrote the script alone, while Maibaum walked the picket line, although Maibaum shared script credit. “I said to Dick that we’ve worked a long time together over the years, and I didn’t feel I wanted to go through an arbitration. I told him I would be happy to share credit, and he said wonderful,” Wilson says. “He was put in a difficult spot, and I wasn’t prepared to make it more difficult.” (Wilson maintains he did not violate any WGA rules by working during the strike. The WGA, through a spokesman, had no comment).

The producers have bowed to the old Bond films by eschewing a pop band in favor of a “power ballad,” in the tradition of Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” and Tom Jones’ “Thunderball” themes, by Gladys Knight. “We had gone with Duran Duran, which paid off handsomely, but a-ha was a disappointment. We thought it would be better this time to go with a power ballad, a ballad with guts in it.”

…Ever since Jack Lord played Leiter in Dr. No, the producers have been looking for someone to replace him—with no luck. “We’ve never found someone who was that solid a performer. This time, we were looking for someone whom we’ve seen as Felix, and whom the audience might have some association with. David Hedison fit the bill.”

Wilson won’t say whether Q will be back next time, though “people love him so much, we would like him to stay on.” (Lois Maxwell had to be replaced as Miss Moneypenny because “it would have meant a change in the playing of the character, and we wanted to keep that relationship intact.”) It’s certain Timothy Dalton will play Bond again, but Wilson feels it’s “not appropriate to discuss his contractual situation” beyond that.

Although there are no more Ian Fleming books or stories to plunder, there are several new 007 bestsellers written by John Gardner, though “we haven’t seen anything in those books that are useful for films,” Wilson says. Nevertheless, the books are “encumbered by us. No one can option those books to anyone but us for perpetuity.”

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Great stuff! Keep it coming, please!

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Excelente. Thanks for posting. Been about four decades since I read a Starlog article…:slightly_smiling_face:

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Fantastic content here. Thanks for posting.

This sentence stuck out for obvious reasons.

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What TD looks like, as of today.

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The idea of casting him as Q or M is really something I would love.

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M.

Without question, Dalton would make a brilliant M.

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He would. But Eon will never do it.

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I will defer to others with better knowledge of EON but I would not discount this possibility for two reasons. 1) He has the acting chops and could pull it off and 2) I believe he has maintained friendly relations with the Broccolis - so I don’t think it would be dismissed out of hand.

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Nor should they.

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I agree. Once you’ve been James Bond 007, there’s no need for you, nor should you, ever play another part in the Bond series.

For one thing, it’s totally unnecessary, and for another, the former 007 actor would be taking away a variety of things (attention, comparability, etc.) from the current 007.

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Some excerpts from the Los Angeles Times article “Reclaiming the Darker Side of Bond,” by Charles Champlin (July 26, 1987):

Dalton says he was first asked about playing James Bond several years ago. Sean Connery was wanting out before he disappeared inside 007 forever.

“I can’t say I was offered it, but a certain interest was expressed,” Dalton said at lunch during a spring visit to Los Angeles. “But I felt I was far too young. And Sean Connery was absolutely wonderful. At the age of 25, that’s the sort of Bond you don’t follow.”

When the firm offer came to do The Living Daylights (with options for further outings If the marketplace is willing) Dalton was busy rehearsing with Vanessa Redgrave for what became a very successful repertory season at the Haymarket Theatre, alternating productions of Antony and Cleopatra and Taming of the Shrew, and he had to turn down the role.

But production of The Living Daylights was delayed. By the time it was again ready to go, Dalton was committed to play Basil St. John in the fllm version of Brenda Starr, shooting in Florida with Brooke Shields as the comic strip newsgal and with Robert Ellis Miller directing. This time the scheduling was tight but workable.

Miller says, “On a Friday night at 6, I said, ‘Cut and print; that’s it and bye-bye,’ and Timothy was off to the airport and started shooting Bond on the Monday.”

Of his Bond, Dalton says, "I’m going to be different, and obviously I’m determined not to be just physically different. Any two people, even if they had the same ideas about the part, would play it differently.

"It’s not going to be me. It’s hopefully going to be something of the essence that Fleming is writing about…It seems to me that the best of the books was the first book, Casino Royale: It was a very, very different kind of a book to be a best seller. It is a spy story but it’s a spy story that’s full of confusion—moral confusion, ethical confusion. It’s Graham Greene country.

"When you end the book you find yourself thinking of Fleming the man, because he was inventing Bond, who is brought face to face with the complexities and realities and difficulties of life, the rights and wrongs.

"Bond is a man who doesn’t like what he does. He’s a man who now, because of his age, no longer sees things In black and white, in easy rights and wrongs. He knows that a man who kills is just himself, working for the other side, a man with a job. He knows that politically speaking a friend becomes an enemy in a couple of years and an enemy becomes a friend.

"I think Bond is deeply prone to a moral and an ethical apathy. It’s often referred to in the Bond books—it’s the first time I’d ever heard the word—as accidie (a kind of moral torpor or exhaustion).

“When Bond wants to give up and get out, a French colleague says—this is only paraphrased—if you find it all too confusing and wrong and uncertain, don’t go for the spies, go for the evil that makes the spies…All the Bond stories are about a man who goes after a very clearly fixed target of evil.”

“The stories,” Dalton says, “carry with them some traces of mythology, Knights of the Round Table, St. George and the Dragon. And that’s a trace of mythology.” Yet the Bond of Bond XV, as Dalton sees him, is not a super-hero In the traditional sense. He’s a survivor who puts his life at risk for what he believes to be right but he also has, thanks to Fleming, everyday vices—smoking three packs a day, gambling, drinking, wenching—that serve, Dalton believes, “to root him amongst us.” At heart, he says, this Bond, at least, is “an ordinary man with special skills and certain qualities.”

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He really knew what Fleming‘s Bond was all about-and it shows in his magnificent portrayal.

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I think Dalton’s best scene was with Pushkin in the hotel room. It personified what his portrayal was all about. Deadly serious and professional.

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That scene is an excellent demonstration of what he brought to the role. Dalton talks about what he considered his best scene in another interview, conducted around the same time. Excerpts follow.

Timothy Dalton Finds a Hamlet In the Hero

By Benedict Nightingale (New York Times, July 26, 1987)

He’s the dashing new 007, complete with guns and fast cars and vodka martinis, “shaken not stirred.” What’s more, he’s somehow managed to become James Bond after refusing the role on no less than three occasions. In 1971, when he was 25, he was asked if he was interested in taking over from Sean Connery, who had decided it was time for fresh challenges; but he thought that would be “the most foolish move possible,” given the likely hostility of a grieving public to his youth and presumption.

Eight years ago, when Mr. Moore was pondering withdrawal, he was seriously sounded out again; but again he declined, this time because he felt unsuited to the series’ high-tech, funhouse style. The third offer came in spring 1986, when Mr. Dalton was committed to a Shakespearan season in London’s West End. But the producers kept failing to find the new Bond they wanted and so kept postponing the starting date of the new Bond movie, The Living Daylights. Suddenly they realized that so much time had passed that they might as well ask Mr. Dalton to reconsider his refusal and start shooting in the fall instead of the summer; and at long last his answer was yes.

The Living Daylights opens in New York next Friday, an important date for Mr. Dalton, who is well aware of the fate of George Lazenby, the actor who did take over Bond from Sean Connery and played the role once only. “If I fail,” he says wryly, “it will be a world-famous failure.” But the movie is doing well in London, and Mr. Dalton himself seems relaxed as he discusses it.

Mr. Dalton is a conscientious, careful actor who does a great deal of hard work on a role before going before the cameras and allowing the intellectual and imaginative results to come flooding instinctively out of him. Before playing a pioneer of surgery in the movie The Doctor and the Devils, for instance, he attended several operations and even an autopsy, “one of the most shocking and gruesome experiences I’ve had.” So when he began to prepare seriously for the part of Bond, his first action was to read all of Ian Fleming’s original work, including the short story, The Living Daylights, on which the new movie is based:

“I felt it would be wrong to pluck the character out of thin air, or to base him on any of my predecessors’ interpretations,” Mr. Dalton says. “Instead, I went to the man who created him, and I was astonished. I’d read a couple of the books years ago, and I thought I’d find them trivial now, but I thoroughly enjoyed every one. It’s not just that they’ve a terrific sense of adventure and you get very involved. On those pages I discovered a Bond I’d never seen on the screen, a quite extraordinary man, a man I really wanted to play, a man of contradictions and opposites.

“He can be ruthless and determined, yet we’re constantly shown what a serious, intelligent, thinking, feeling human being he is. He’s a man of principle too, almost an idealist, but one who sees that he’s living in a world without principle, in which ideals are cheaply bought and sold. He’s a man who wants human contact; the need for love seems to overflow from him. Yet he can’t afford emotional involvement, he can’t fall in love or marry or have children, because that would prevent him functioning in a world where the possibility of his death is ever-present.

“Above all, I realized that he hates to kill. He recalls that when he was young, he thought it was all in the cause of righteousness, but now he perceives his assassinations as dirty murders. He kills himself by killing someone who’s himself on the other side. Yet he carries on, always regretting it, always trying to shut it out of his mind. Altogether, it seemed to me that Bond was a complex man, with many more facets than I’d realized. Not a shining knight, but someone deeply unhappy with his job, suffering from confusion, ennui, moral revulsion and what Fleming calls accidie.”

It sounds like a psychological profile of existential man at his most alienated; but Mr. Dalton is quick to emphasize that the books are also immensely entertaining thrillers, with a sympathetic protagonist to match. “Yes, Bond is a hero, someone with tenacity and resilience and resolution, someone who can pull out extraordinary qualities in a crisis. But he’s a real hero, not a superman but someone who feels fear, someone who’s constantly described as having insides that twist and wrench with fear, someone who leaves you understanding exactly what it’s like to be in a terrifying situation. Someone the reader can identify with.

“And of course he’s fun, he has a lust for life. He gambles, he drinks, he drives fast cars, he has casual sex or at least falls in love for a rather limited time. But that’s because he lives on the edge of life and wants to live it to the full while he’s still got it. To me, that’s perfectly human.”

In other words, what Mr. Dalton wanted to create was a Bond unfamiliar to the cinema audience, though one nearer to the Connery than the Moore version. “I very much admired what Roger did. His skill at light comedy and self-send-up fitted completely with the style of the films as they became after Sean Connery left them. But they were fantasies, extravaganzas. They had left Ian Fleming a long way behind with their special effects and gimmickry and cool one-liners. I mean, you can’t really play Bond seriously if you’re about to leap into a minijet airplane that comes out of the back end of a horse, which is what I recall happening in Octopussy.”

As it turned out, his wishes coincided with those of the producers, who felt the series had become too remote from reality. Indeed, what finally convinced Mr. Dalton to take the role was Albert Broccoli’s promise to give him freedom of interpretation, or as much freedom as the script of The Living Daylights allows him.

[In Dalton’s performance] there’s slyness, anger, fear, even a sense of horror—and, Mr. Dalton would like to believe, all those commodities combine in the sequence he found the most challenging and fulfilling to play. That’s when he cavorts happily at a fairgrounds with a girl who may be a K.G.B. spy and may be a genuine defector, then sees the British agent who has helped him sliced in half, then is confronted with her ambiguous charms once again. “He’s manipulating her, abusing her, yet he’s romantic, interested in her. And then he has to acknowledge she could easily be part of that murder. You should suddenly see the shutters drop, the steel come out. It’s a key moment, one that needs very careful playing.”

Timothy Dalton think he’s personally as different from 007 as could be. For instance, he loves classical music, the drama, the opera—“And I think Bond only once went into a theater, and that was when he was following someone.” He performed some of his own stunts in The Living Daylights, including the opening sequence, which has him locked in mortal combat on top of a Land Rover racing along a cliff edge; but in real life his most physically taxing interest is angling.

Really, he seems happiest talking about his work: “In a way, I like tackling material I think impossible because that provokes an extreme effort of imagination and commitment. But I could never say which of my parts had most satisfied me or which was my favorite. Even my failures are my blood, my sweat, my care, my love, part of me; and I can’t disown them.” He’s determined to keep alternating between stage and screen, keep choosing parts that excite him, keep a creative variety in his life.

In fact, his hope is that Bond will open options, not close them. “If you’re a success, you get offered major parts in other films, don’t you? And what’s especially nice is that people are already sending me scripts, interesting scripts, they can’t easily find finance for. If somehow my involvement with Bond would enhance the prospect of British films like My Beautiful Laundrette or Letter to Brezhnev being made—well, that would be terrific.”

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Dalton’s best scene and the best scene in the franchise as far as I’m concerned.

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That’s very true. Bond is cycling through a variety of emotions there. He leaves Saunders on good terms after their frosty encounter in Bratislava, and then he’s looking at his dead body full of rage. That’s communicated effectively with the balloon popping and the closeup of his face.

Dalton pulling out the PPK in front of the child is powerful and symbolic of his portrayal too, giving things a sense of realism and humanity that other films in the franchise lack. He’s ‘living on the edge’ as the poster said, controlling himself before he loses control. When he says “I got the message” and they’re leaving “immediately” it contrasts strongly to his demeanour at the fairground.

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A new interview with Dalton has appeared in Vanity Fair. It goes over many of his roles, but only the Bond bits are excerpted below:

Is it true that during the ’70s you were first approached by 007 producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli about playing Bond?

There was a time when Sean Connery was leaving and—I can’t say I was offered it, but I was asked if I’d like to do it or not. And I said no, because it seemed to me that the age of 24 or 25 doesn’t seem quite right for this character. So that is true.

You thought of 007 as an older, more established character?

He needs to be. You could play it at that younger age, but I don’t know that I’d believe it that much.

Was that an easy no? Or was it something you had to wrestle with?

It was easy enough. You don’t want to follow Sean Connery, who was truly, truly magnificent—and who I had been watching in the role since I was 13 or 14. No, don’t do that.

The Broccolis approached you again about playing Bond in the mid-’80s.

I was doing The Taming of the Shrew and Antony and Cleopatra at the Haymarket Theatre in the West End of London. I wasn’t chasing it. I remember being in a hotel room thinking, What the f*** am I going to do about this? And then I thought, Well, it’s a once in a lifetime, isn’t it? Does good sense say, “Go and do something else,” or does good sense say, “Take a once-in-a-lifetime and then go and do something else”? So you go and do it.

Your Bond was very distinct from the previous ones.

I tried. But then that’s what a lot of people did not like.

I don’t know if that’s true. Do you feel vindicated now that Daniel Craig has finished his run and many people now compare the way he plays Bond to the way you played Bond?

Is that so?

There’s an aspect to your Bond that has more gravitas. I’d say he’s still playful. In The Living Daylights, he still lands on that boat and pops the Champagne…

And goes down the mountain in a cello case.

But you delivered a grimmer aspect to him: This is a guy who does dirty work sometimes. There are many comparisons between your Bond and Daniel Craig’s that are very favorable and say essentially you laid the foundation for that type of character.

Nice to think so. You’re confronted by a lot of problems. You’re taking over from someone. You don’t copy them. So that’s dangerous. And one of the things you have to remember is almost every person in the world who’s ever seen a Bond movie has a point of view about the Bond movies. It’s astonishing.

Are you generally happy with how your Bond movies turned out?

Some of it works very well. I like a lot of it.

Have you ever had a conversation with any of the other actors who’ve played Bond?

No. Well, I’ve spoken, yes, but not about Bond. Roger Moore, I met in the South of France and he was delightful. A really kind, nice, generous sort of person. Sean Connery, believe it or not, I met in a toilet. But no mutual recognition. I mean, one is discreet in a men’s room.

But you and Roger really never spoke about this character you both shared?

No, that’s a pain in the ass. “Can I talk to you about Bond, please?” “F*** off.” [Laughs.]

Doesn’t it feel like an elephant in the room, though?

It is very much! But he was great. I know Pierce Brosnan a little bit, and I don’t know Daniel Craig, but I think I’ve met him once.

Do you wish there had been more Bond movies for you?

I don’t wish there was more.

My understanding is that a third film with you was delayed by a lawsuit over the rights, then when the parties finally came around to making another one years later, it was your choice to not return.

I would say so. Or it may have been that timing was involved.

Once you let it go, was there any regret?

No, not in the slightest. I have some good friends from the Bond days, some really good people, but they’re trapped. Everyone’s trapped by it in a way. I never really wanted to do more than three, but he wouldn’t accept that.

You mean Cubby Broccoli?

Yeah—who I thought was a terrific man. I really liked him. I think I’m just getting to the point where, “Why the hell am I talking about James Bond?” We should forget it.

I think 007 means something to people.

It does. It means a lot to a lot of people…. Let me ask you a question: What value do you think something like James Bond has? It has entertainment value, of course. But does it have any real serious value?

I think it does. You have to think about what people get out of these movies. There’s something about the precision of Bond, the elegance of Bond that people wish they had. Most of us are just bumbling and fumbling. The way you played him, he was suave, but also dangerous.

That to me would be right. I think it ended up being like that because it’s much more attractive—but it’s a nasty f***ing job.

You mean being a spy in real life?

Betraying people, killing people, and risking your own life. If it’s really important, then it’s worth doing. But you wouldn’t want your son or your friends doing it. You are betraying everybody around you because you’re deceiving them in order to get what you want.

That’s the reality of espionage, but the romantic version of it is Bond.

How romantic do you think those first James Bond films were? If you remember that fight on the train [in From Russia With Love], there’s nothing romantic about that. That was a fabulous fight. But I think they’ve all gone way into fantasy now.

Maybe, but I’ll give you an example from The Living Daylights. You just said, “These are characters who betray each other, they lie,” but he has the opportunity to shoot Maryam d’Abo in the opening scene and he chooses not to. And that makes him different from someone who just follows orders, because in real life he would’ve just shot her.

Spot on. That is the moment!

As a viewer you think, “I’m on his side because he has a moral code.”

Yes, I’d forgotten that.

Everybody lies to Bond in that movie. He’s the only honest one.

[Nods.] Everybody lies to everybody.

I think that’s why I’m so fond of that film and your performances. That’s why people still want to talk about it.

Also, because 007 affected all of us from a very young age. One of the first movies all of us ever saw.

Cubby Broccoli’s family, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, oversaw the Bond franchise for many years after his death in 1996, but the news just broke that they’ve stepped back from creative control in a deal that gives those rights to Amazon. Have you followed that?

I have read about it and I find it very, very surprising. Whether it will work or not, who knows? Barbara is a wonderful woman, a wonderful person with James Bond very much in her heart. She’s learned so much from her dad. Her dad was like iron about the Bond shows. He’d got it started in the first place, and he made sure that what was in the films were what he wanted. I thought he was a terrific man. Now, what can you say? You just have to say that you hope Amazon does a damn good job. You can’t say anything other than good luck and make it well. Follow the master.

Do you have anything you would say to whomever ends up playing 007 next?

Well, whoever does it has got to have a very clear sense of what they want to achieve, because everybody in the world has got a different opinion about it.

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Great interview. I am pleasantly surprised how willing he was to talk about Bond at length. When I first came to your post I thought we would get 2-3 questions before Dalton wanted to move on. Interesting too how quickly referenced the train fight in FRWL.

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