Debbie McWilliams, the casting director who worked on 14 Bond films, said at Karlovy Vary that she has no opinion on who should follow George Lazenby-style expectations into James Bond and that the role still has to read as a threat. Her comments land after Amazon MGM Studios took full control of the character and its IP in February 2025.
Karlovy Vary on Bond
“I neither know, and I have no opinion,” McWilliams said when asked who the next Bond will be. She added that the character must stay faithful to Ian Fleming’s creation: “No, I don’t think so. Ian Fleming wrote a character, and that’s the character that stays.”
McWilliams has spent 4 decades in casting and said, “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 also put the point more bluntly: “He’s got to have a kind of threat about him.” That is the line she has kept returning to as the franchise looks toward its next lead.
Daniel Craig and Judi Dench
Daniel Craig was not the easy sell. McWilliams said, “It took a long time,” adding, “I scoured the world.” Her account was that “nobody was particularly interested” at first and that Craig was “quite reluctant” to take the role. Barbara Broccoli saw him in Layer Cake in 2004 and asked to meet him.
Judi Dench’s casting followed a similar script-first logic. McWilliams said the role of M had traditionally been played by a man, then 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 said Dench was in the room the next day and “absolutely thrilled to be asked.”
Amazon MGM Studios takes over
February 2025 changed the stakes. Amazon MGM Studios struck a deal with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson to take full control of the Bond character and its IP, which means the casting judgment McWilliams describes will now sit inside a new ownership structure. She said, “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.”
McWilliams also drew a hard line on the type of actor she thinks does not fit the part: “No, I don’t think so. Ian Fleming wrote a character, and that’s the character that stays.” Her view is a useful marker for the next casting cycle: the discussion is no longer about who is in the conversation, but whether the new owners keep the same standard for menace, physical authority, and screen presence that shaped the last 14 Bond films.
McWilliams has another constraint of her own: “I’ve never read a James Bond book in my life.” She said her casting decisions were always based on the scripts alone, and that is still the cleanest read on what comes next. Whoever gets the role will have to satisfy the page before the mythology.
