Amazon Confirms Bond 26 Casting Search As A Recent Official Novel Treats Conservatives As The Villain

Amazon MGM Studios confirmed yesterday that auditions for the next James Bond are underway. Casting director Nina Gold, known for Game of Thrones, The Crown, and five Star Wars films, is leading the search. Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Steven Knight are attached. The studio statement read: “The search for the next James Bond is underway. While we don’t plan to comment on specific details during the casting process, we’re excited to share more news with 007 fans as soon as the time is right.”

The announcement is welcome news on the surface. Bond has been dormant since Daniel Craig’s No Time to Die in 2021. Five years is a long gap for a franchise that spent decades releasing films every two to three years.

The question is what franchise fans are actually getting back.

The answer may be in the official Bond novels published while the films were in development. On His Majesty’s Secret Service (2023), written by Charlie Higson and sold as a current-era Bond adventure, places 007 in a plot to stop a wealthy eccentric named Athelstan of Wessex from disrupting King Charles III’s coronation. One passage, now circulating online, describes Bond infiltrating a gathering at the villain’s castle and observing the assembled guests.

The passage describes a character named Roger Birkett, identified as an ex-Tory MP “famous for promoting covid/vaccines/mask-wearing/5G conspiracy theories, which had spilled over into the usual anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-BBC, anti-MSM, anti-cultural Marxist, Climate Change Denial pronouncements.” The book adds he was removed from the Conservative Party over “an anti-trans diatribe.”

Bond’s reaction to the room: “It was a long while since he’d been at any kind of function that was almost exclusively full of men. It felt strange. There was not even a pretence at diversity here. Æthelstan hadn’t been the least bit concerned about ensuring that half of the people he’d hired to carry out his coup should be women, or non-white, or disabled.”

That is the villain’s gathering. Conservatives and conspiracy theorists are the hired muscle for a coup attempt.

This is the lens through which the official Bond universe is now framing opposition to the modern cultural consensus: not just wrong, but sinister. The man who questions vaccines stands in the same passage as the man helping overthrow the British government. It is not subtle, and it is not accidental. Higson wrote the passage. Editors approved it. The Ian Fleming estate sanctioned it as an official Bond continuation.

The franchise has been trending this direction for years. No Time to Die handed Bond’s 007 designation to Nomi, a Black female agent, while Craig’s Bond spent much of the film sidelined. The Amazon-era prequel series 007: First Light cast Patrick Gibson as a younger, softer Bond described by its own promotional materials as suited to “the modern age.” Bleedingfool covered the series announcement under the headline “New 007 Won’t Be ‘Old School Bond,’ but a Sensitive Modern Spy.”

Amazon acquired MGM and the Bond IP in 2022 for $8.45 billion. The Broccoli family, which controlled the franchise for decades under Eon Productions, retained some involvement but Amazon holds the commercial reins. The studio that brought you The Boys, a series built on contempt for patriotism and traditional heroism, now owns James Bond.

Villeneuve is a skilled director. Dune and Arrival demonstrate he can handle large-scale material. Steven Knight wrote Peaky Blinders. The filmmaking infrastructure around Bond 26 is not the problem. The problem is the ideological environment the franchise is operating inside, documented now in its own official prose fiction, where a room full of men with no diversity quotas is framed as evidence of villainy.

The casting search is open. The studio says it wants a British male in his late twenties or early thirties who looks like he could kill you. That is the right instinct on paper. Whether the film built around that man reflects the character Ian Fleming created, or the character that official Bond novels are now building toward, is the question Bond fans should be asking right now.

What do you think about the direction Amazon is taking the Bond franchise? Let us know in the comments.

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