Is Aaron Taylor-Johnson The Next James Bond?

Good news for the Princess of Wales and her private secretaries: the British public now has something else to be furiously divided over besides her Mother’s Day photo. Producer Barbara Broccoli, proud owner of the best name in show business, may or may not have offered Aaron Taylor-Johnson the hallowed role of 007, vacant since Daniel Craig’s Bond shuffled off his martini-drenched mortal coil in No Time to Die. The casting is surprising news to everyone apart from my near-omniscient colleague Radhika Seth, who’s been trying to predict who will slip into Bond’s Crockett & Jones Oxfords for years now, with the Marvel actor among her frontrunners since word spread that he had done a test read at Pinewood Studios.

Read more: Who Will Be The Next James Bond?

It’s The Sun that – maybe, not really – “confirmed” this morning that Eon Productions had issued a contract to Taylor-Johnson (whose epithet in the paper is, of course, “British hunk”), but it’s only taken a few hours for a “production insider” to tell BBC News that there’s “no truth in the rumours”. This being a post-truth age, however, precisely no one seems to care about the latter part of that sentence, with verve and vitriol flooding the internet in not-quite-equal measure. To summarise the feelings of those emotionally shaken, not stirred by the announcement: after years of toying with the idea of making Bond something other than a Tom Ford-clad fantasy designed to soothe fragile male egos, this casting feels as dry as Die Another Day. (“Ah, patriarchal power play, we’ve been expecting you.”)

Which isn’t to say, of course, that Taylor-Johnson isn’t talented. The 33-year-old became a household name at the age of 18 thanks to his starring role in the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy (2009), Sam Taylor-Wood’s directorial debut. The pair married in 2012 – although not before much had been made of their 23-year age gap in the press. Aaron, a High Wycombe native, has worked steadily ever since, with roles in Nocturnal Animals (2016), A Million Little Pieces (2018), Tenet (2020), and Bullet Train (2022), where he proved his action-movie chops alongside Brad Pitt. Taylor-Johnson’s only comment on the rumours so far? “I find it charming and wonderful that people see me in that role,” he told Numero magazine. “I take it as a great compliment.” As he should, when Regé-Jean Page was also a contender.