Why playing James Bond put Timothy Dalton in “a bubble”
Taking on an iconic role is never easy. When audiences get attached to a character, they often get hooked to the person bringing that character to life as well. Through the years, some of the most iconic figures in film and television have seen changes in personnel due to age restrictions, death, or simply a need to move on. Albus Dumbledore, Captain James Kirk, Peter Parker, and Buffy Summers are all iconic characters with more than one actor to their name, but few roles are as hotly contested and desired as James Bond.
When Timothy Dalton came on board as 007, the odds were already stacked against him. The shadow of Sean Connery continued to loom large. Roger Moore had wrung out as much with the Bond character as humanly possible before being forced to step aside, having out-aged the role. A public desire to bring in Pierce Brosnan to succeed Moore had been foiled by the producers of Remington Steele, which worsened matters. This caused The Living Daylights to be hastily rewritten for Dalton during a brief window.
Dalton only got two opportunities to play Bond: 1987’s The Living Daylights and 1989’s Licence to Kill. He had signed a three-film contract and had every intention of returning to the franchise, but a legal snafu surrounding the rights to the franchise stalled the start of production. When these were resolved, producer Cubby Broccoli insisted that Dalton sign on for five more films to give the role stability. Unwilling to accept the terms, Dalton resigned from the role before work on GoldenEye officially began and was replaced with the actor whom he had replaced initially: Brosnan.
Dalton’s time as Bond was a mixed bag, both personally and professionally. His two films have their fans but are largely seen as mid-tier Bond adventures. Like all actors who take on the role, Dalton found trouble distancing himself from 007 after stepping away from the character. When asked about the overall experience he has taken away from being involved with the James Bond films, Dalton expressed his mixed feelings to The A.V. Club in 2018.
“I should be careful what I say, because, of course, everyone is interested in Bond,” Dalton said. “It’s almost like a bracket or a bubble in one’s life. Everybody treats the idea of a Bond film different to anything else. I mean, journalists come knowing the story they want to write, whereas on a normal piece of work we’re all discovering what to write about. We’re discovering what we’re acting. It’s part of the creative process. But in a Bond movie? No. People know what they want to write about. And they know, really, what they want”.
“Everyone’s got an opinion, from the top of the studio down to the guy in the street,” Dalton added. “But you’re sort of … outside. No one, no matter how well someone can communicate, can tell you – and I certainly can’t really communicate accurately – what it is like to be the actor playing James Bond. The only actors who can are the other actors who’ve played the part. It’s kind of astonishing, really. You are in kind of a bubble. It’s real, it’s valuable, it’s exciting, and it can give great pleasure. And yet it’s somehow unreal. No, forget the ‘unreal’ bit. But it’s somehow outside the normal course of what we all share in”.
Dalton eventually described the filming of his movies as “a fantastic experience,” but his trepidation to thoroughly analyse his time as Bond is understandable. Dalton also believed that Daniel Craig accomplished what he had tried to execute as Bond.
“Everyone’s happy with what they know. And everyone intellectually says, ‘Well, yes… it was getting a bit stale, it was getting a bit this, that, and the other,” Dalton commented. “But nobody actually wants to [change]. So it wasn’t as easy as one would hope. I mean, now they have. I think now, with Daniel [Craig], they have. But that was, what, almost 20 years later that they actually embarked on something more believable?”