For almost five years James Bond was a faceless character. Daniel Craig left him to die, literally, at the end of No Time to Dieclosing in 2021 a cycle that began fifteen years earlier with Casino Royaleand since then around the seemingly simplest question of contemporary cinema – who will be the next 007? – there has been a mass of rumors involving practically every British actor young enough, elegant enough or simply famous enough to wear a tuxedo. Now, however, something has changed: the research has really begun and, above all, for the first time there is a plausible deadline.
Amy Pascal, who produces the new chapter together with David Heyman, explained to Deadline That the end of 2026 is “a good bet” to choose the new James Bondimplicitly confirming that the next few months will be the decisive ones after the official start of the hearings last spring. Amazon MGM announced in May that casting was underway, while in the following weeks the process entered a new phase, with further tests expected during the summer and Denis Villeneuve directly involved in the selection.
However, it is important to distinguish the information that actually emerged from the casting from the gigantic gossip machine that has accompanied Bond for years now. There is currently no official shortlist of three actorsand Amazon MGM has explicitly chosen not to comment on individual nominees. The names that appear most insistently in the most recent rumors are Jacob Elordi, Harris Dickinson and Callum Turner, indicated as profiles compatible with what Villeneuve, Pascal and Heyman would be looking for, but none of them have been confirmed by the studio. Tom Holland, often included in the same squad, instead appeared among the names on the wishlist reported by Variety as early as the summer of 2025, when the project was still at a much earlier stage.
And this is where the next James Bond becomes something more interesting than simple casting. Because it will be the twenty-sixth film of the saga the first Bond built under the new balance of power born after the transition of creative control to Amazon MGM Studios. In 2025 Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, heirs of the family that had safeguarded the cinematic character practically since the birth of the saga, reached an agreement with Amazon for a new joint venture in which the parties remain co-owners of the intellectual property, while Amazon MGM obtained creative control of the franchise.
It’s not an industrial detail. For sixty years James Bond was one of Hollywood’s most extraordinary anomalies: a global brand of enormous value that remained under the almost artisanal supervision of the same family, capable of determining not only who could play 007, but also when the time came to change tone, director and direction. Another era inevitably begins with Amazon, and the first choice of the new course will also be the most delicate, because whoever is chosen will not simply have to replace Daniel Craig, but become the James Bond through which Amazon will demonstrate what it wants to do with James Bond.
The group in charge of the transformation, moreover, is hardly random. David Heyman built one of the most recognizable film franchises of the 21st century by producing the saga of Harry PotterAmy Pascal knows inside out how big Hollywood properties work through Spider-Manwhile the screenplay was entrusted to Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders. Denis Villeneuve, author of, will direct Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and the saga of Duneswho at the time of the announcement had defined Bond as a “sacred” territory for him and promised to respect its tradition while simultaneously opening the way towards new missions.
This could be the real indication of the Bond to come. Villeneuve is not a director chosen to administer an existing brand: he is an author who in recent years has demonstrated his ability to take already enormous universes, from Blade Runner to Dunespreserving its identity while profoundly modifying its visual language. Knight is also a screenwriter accustomed to male protagonists in whom charm, violence, vulnerability and morality coexist without necessarily being reconciled. If the combination works, the new 007 could move away from both the imitation of Craig and the temptation to simply recover the more ironic and elegant Bond of the past.
Then the problem of the face remains.
Jacob Elordi he is perhaps the candidate who would make the desire to open up a new generation more evident. Australian, like George Lazenby before him, built next Euphoria a career far less predictable than that suggested by his initial status as a generational idol, moving on from Priscilla by Sofia Coppola a Saltburn and progressively choosing roles capable of exploiting both their physical presence and a certain ambiguity. Its limit, paradoxically, could be recognisability: Bond requires a star, but historically it worked better when the actor was not even more famous than the character.
Harris Dickinson instead it possesses a different quality, less immediately Hollywood-like and perhaps for this reason particularly compatible with the project. From Triangle of Sadness to Babygirlpassing through The Iron Clawshowed the ability to move from elegance to fragility without losing that physical component necessary to make credible an agent who, behind the tuxedo and the martini, remains above all a man authorized to kill.
Then there is Callum Turnera name that has become progressively more insistent in recent months and perhaps the one that, at least on paper, most retains something of the classic model: British, presence as a leading man, a career important enough to make it recognizable but not yet so cumbersome as to precede the character, with titles like Fantastic Beasts, The Boys in the Boat And Masters of the Air behind. It is bigger than the initial idea, circulated in 2025, of necessarily focusing on an interpreter under the age of thirty, and this precisely demonstrates how the profile of the new Bond can still be fluid. However, the most recent rumors place him among the actors who respond to the type of interpreter taken into consideration for the new tests.
And Tom Holland? His name didn’t come out of nowhere at all: Variety he had indicated him in 2025 together with Elordi and Dickinson among the actors present in the Amazon wishlist. But there is an enormous distance between being desired by a studio in the first phase of development and reaching the final screen tests, especially when we are talking about an actor who is already Spider-Man and who inevitably brings with him one of the most recognizable cinematic identities of his generation.
In reality there could be yet another possibility, perhaps the most fascinating: that the next James Bond is a name that appears little or not at all in betting today. Nina Gold, the casting director chosen to lead the search and already responsible for enormous castings among game of Thrones, The Crown And Star Warsin fact he also met lesser-known interpreters, while Variety reported that among the actors already auditioned is Tom Francis, a British born in 1999 who has established himself above all in the theatre.
It is a possibility that would also have the history of the saga on its side. Debbie McWilliams, casting director of Bond for forty years and among the people who contributed to the choices of Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, recently criticized the very idea of necessarily relying on names that monopolize the rumours, explaining that 007 must retain something enigmatic and that she would prefer to see an almost unexpected actor emerge, capable of disappearing into Bond instead of forcing Bond to coexist with an already perfectly defined celebrity.
After all, it had already happened with Daniel Craig. When it was announced in 2005, some fans considered the choice almost a sacrilege: too blond, too distant from the established image of the character, apparently unsuitable to take up the legacy of Pierce Brosnan. Casino Royale he transformed that protest into the opposite demonstration and ushered in a more physical, wounded and vulnerable Bond, destined to become simply James Bond for an entire generation. Craig would play the character in five films, up to No Time to Dieleaving the saga with a problem that no casting algorithm can solve: the next Bond has to be familiar enough to recognize and different enough that you need to start watching it again.
This is probably what Amy Pascal means when she insists on the need to proceed in an extremely methodical manner and to find something different from the performance left by Craig. Because choosing a young actor potentially means tying him to the character for ten or fifteen years, building not just a film but another cinematic era around him.
Industry indications point to a possible start of production in 2027 and a release in 2028, although Amazon MGM has not yet officially announced a date.
The decision that really matters will come first. Sean Connery had transformed a literary character into an icon, Roger Moore had brought him towards irony, Timothy Dalton had recovered his harshness, Pierce Brosnan had embodied the elegance of the nineties and Daniel Craig had demonstrated that even James Bond could bleed, fall in love, age and die.
Now Amazon has to decide not only that who will be the seventh actor of the official saga to pronounce «Bond, James Bond»but which James Bond still makes sense to tell in 2028.
And this is why, among all the names circulating, the decisive one could be precisely the one we don’t know yet.
