In a recent interview, James Bond movies are based on a series of novels and short stories by Ian Fleming.
But it’s been a while since the films took their storylines or even their titles from Fleming’s source material. The actors haven’t always played Bond as Fleming wrote him. The 007 seen on-screen hasn’t always lined up with the suave, cold-blooded antihero created by Fleming on the page.
Roger Moore
Roger Moore made the role of Bond his own after Sean Connery’s iconic initial run. But in doing so, he threw the source material out the window. Moore’s goofy, comedic performance as Bond is the silliest take on the character by far – he even went to space and engaged in a laser shootout over Earth. His 007 adventures have some thrilling set-pieces and tense standoffs, but his movies are primarily defined by tongue-in-cheek humor that can’t be found in Fleming’s novels.
The majority of Moore’s Bond humor is visual, with slapstick gags ranging from a clown disguise to a Tarzan swing through the jungle to running across the backs of alligators, so it wouldn’t have worked in a literary format. The Moore era also had a sly self-awareness poking fun at the Bond legacy, whereas Fleming’s novels were straightforward spy thrillers.
George Lazenby
George Lazenby only played Bond in one movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but his turn is considered to be the weakest performance as 007 in one of the strongest Bond films. Since Lazenby was a model by trade and not an actor, he didn’t quite capture the nuances that make Bond a complex, three-dimensional figure. 007 is a tragic hero in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He doesn’t just seduce and abandon his latest romantic interest; he falls head over heels in love, gets married, and embarks on a life of marital bliss.
But that marital bliss is sadly short-lived as his wife is gunned down by one of Blofeld’s henchmen in a drive-by shooting in the movie’s heartbreaking final scene. This somber ending is more in line with the tone of Fleming’s writing than the crude sexual innuendos that usually end Bond films.
Pierce Brosnan
Pierce Brosnan’s performance as Bond was based less on Fleming’s source material and more on previous adaptations of the character. Brosnan’s turn as 007 is an amalgamation of every actor who had taken on the role up to that point. He combined Connery’s coolness, Lazenby’s sensitivity, Moore’s wry sense of humor, and Dalton’s edge. Brosnan’s 007 was more of an homage to the legacy of Bond’s cinematic portrayal than a straightforward adaptation of the original novels.
Aside from his debut in GoldenEye, all of Brosnan’s Bond films were met with mixed reviews – especially his final outing in the role, Die Another Day – but the actor’s performance was always widely praised for capturing everything that moviegoers love about this character.
Daniel Craig
The latest actor to take on the role of Bond, Daniel Craig, played the part with effortless charisma. He gave arguably the coolest performance as 007 since the trendsetting tenure of Sean Connery. Craig’s Bond had suaveness in spades, but he was also surprisingly emotional. He fell in love more than once, he fathered a daughter, and his tenure came to a close with a tearjerking death scene.
Some fans would argue that Fleming’s Bond would always escape certain doom instead of accepting his fate and waiting for the nukes to land, but the heartbreaking sacrifice made by Craig’s Bond gave his five-film run a true sense of finality.
Sean Connery
With his original run of six Bond movies (and one unofficial one about a decade later), Sean Connery set the bar high for on-screen portrayals of 007. With his immortal introduction – “Bond, James Bond” – Connery made 007 an instant icon and ensured a cinematic legacy that would last well beyond half a century. From the very beginning, Connery embodied the suave, ice-cool nature of the Bond seen in Fleming’s stories.
According to the Express, Fleming was initially unhappy with Connery’s casting and complained about a “working-class Scot” being hired to play his well-to-do English gentleman spy character. But Fleming ended up enjoying Connery’s portrayal of 007 so much that he wrote Scottish ancestry into Bond’s backstory.
Timothy Dalton
Timothy Dalton’s short-lived tenure in the role of Bond is by far the most faithful to the source material. In The Living Daylights and the controversially gruesome License to Kill, Dalton played Bond as a cold-hearted killer befitting of the brooding antihero found on the pages of Fleming’s original novels. Whether he was chasing a black-market arms dealer in cahoots with a Soviet general or pursuing a personal vendetta against a sadistic drug lord, Dalton played 007 as a lean, mean killing machine.
Sadly, Dalton’s Bond only lasted for two movies in the late 1980s before being replaced by Brosnan, because the darker, more faithful tone divided fans who only know 007 from the movie adaptations – especially on the heels of Moore’s comical, slapstick-y portrayal of the character. Fans of the movies found Dalton’s Bond films to be too dramatic and violent, but old-school fans of the books found them to be a pitch-perfect translation of the character as written by Fleming.
