The 25th instalment in the James Bond franchise released on Thursday. This comes after a gap of six year. ‘No Time to Die’ is the last film with Daniel Craig in the titular role of James Bond. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the film has its screenplay put together by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Fleabag fame Phoebe Waller-Bridge. 

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As it continues to roar in the box office, let’s look back at the character and its origin.

James Bond is popularly known to be a spy at MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service and goes by code number 007.  Writer Ian Fleming created the character, making him the central, key figure of his works. Fleming had earlier said in an interview to the Times that “Bond was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war”.

Later in an interview to the The New York Times in 1962, Fleming said, “When I wrote the first one in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument … when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard.”

Interestingly, Fleming incorporated many of his character traits into Bond’s, such as his taste for scrambled eggs, his golf handicap and his own brand of toiletries. Fleming wrote twelve spy novels starring Bond and two short stories. The first one was 1953 released Casino Royale. Writers Kingsley Amis, Christopher Wood, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver wrote the Bond novels after Fleming’s death in 1964. 

The first Bond film, Dr No released in 1962, starring Sean Connery as Bond. Connery went on to essay the role for a total of six films. Actor George Lazenby also played the British spy in ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’. Pierce Brosnan gave four back-to-back Bond films: GoldenEye; Tomorrow Never Dies; The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day. Daniel Craig played the character for five films. No Time to Die is his last one as Bond.

As for the future Bond, there have been speculations that actors like Idris Elba, Rege-Jean Page and Tom Hardy could be considered. While people are expecting a black James Bond, some are even loving the idea of a female James Bond. The producers of the Bond Franchise have said that they would think about it all only after the “dust has settled on the Daniel Craig era”.