What the data says about who should be the next James Bond
I scored 460 British and Irish actors against six decades of Bond casting decisions to see who actually fits the brief, and where the audience and the studio are pulling in opposite directions.
Predicting who will be the next James Bond has become one of the great communal conversations. Whether that’s via prediction markets, professional bookmakers, newspaper headlines, or just down the pub - everyone has an opinion.
I think it should be said loud and often that this is a deeply silly thing to bet on. Predicting the Bond casting is less of a science, more like forecasting the weather next Christmas (ie, will it be white).
There are real underlying patterns in the historical data, but the actual decision is being made in private by a small group of people working with information you and I do not have. Even the professional bookies are essentially trading on rumour, public sightings, agent gossip, and the occasional carefully-placed leak.
I hope the silliness of my video above conveys how seriously this should be taken. BUT… that’s not to say the topic lacks merit. A number of important ideas around casting, acting, and IP management emerge as we frolic through the data. So, let’s take a look with a view to gambol rather than gamble.
The current state of play
At CinemaCon 2026 a few weeks ago, Courtenay Valenti, Amazon MGM’s head of theatrical said:
Now, I know you’re all wondering when we’re going to announce who’s playing James Bond. Please know that we’re taking the time to do this with care and deep respect. It is the dream of a lifetime for all of us to bring audiences this next chapter, and it’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly.
What I can tell you is this: when you pair one of the most beloved franchises in history with a world-class filmmaking team… setting the stage for something that’s truly worthy of the Bond legacy. That film is coming, and when the time is right, we’ll have much more to share.
This means we all have a brief window in which to have fun speculating!
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the top Bond brass at Amazon. You have been handed the most consequential casting decision in commercial cinema. You don’t have a name in mind. You have a brief, a budget, a multi-billion-pound franchise, and a producer breathing down your neck. How do you build the shortlist?
The honest answer is that it is a series of cuts. Some hard. Some soft. Some defensible by data, others by gut feel and politics. By the end of the process, you should have a list of perhaps five names sitting on a desk in a building Amazon hasn’t shared with the rest of us.
Let’s see how far we can get with the public info we have...
The hard requirements
The hard requirements are the cuts you can defend with a sentence. Each one is a decision a producer would actually make in week one of the search.
1. Male
Bond producer Barbara Broccoli said only a couple of years ago that:
He can be of any colour, but he is male.
It’s not clear to what extent Amazon agrees, but the vast majority of the public does. A YouGov poll from 2023 asked Americans which traits a future Bond must have.
The public is conservative on gender (72% want a man) but genuinely open on race (only 39% require a white actor).
So when doing my first pass cut of names, I followed the majority on the male requirement, and left race open.
2. British (or convincingly so)
This is the cut where the data and the principle disagree.
The whole concept of acting is one about convincing people you’re something you’re not. Therefore, on the one hand, it seems absurd to place a birthplace requirement on the person who goes running around with a fake gun, fake-killing other liars in a fictional story we all know didn’t happen.
But now we touch on another aspect of casting - believability. The audience needs to be willing to suspend their disbelief and stop seeing the actor and start seeing a real superspy. And nationality plays a part in this shared public delusion.
Deadline reported in September 2025 that the casting brief for Bond 26 is:
British, male, unknown, late 20s to early 30s.
So whatever I think about national-flag accents, it seems like I need to keep it as a hard rule with which to filter our candidates.
(The rule I settled on was more accurately “The British Isles” than just “Great Britain”. The differences between all the ways people describe the islands is a massive rabbit hole. If you have two minutes, watch this; if you have two hours, watch this).
3. In their thirties
Amazon has to be hoping that they pick the right person now and get to ride that successful casting for at least a decade, maybe two. That places extra pressure on the person to be as young as possible, while still pulling off the role in their debut Bond (likely release date is 2028)
Broccoli told Variety in 2022
When we cast Bond, it’s a 10, 12-year commitment. So he’s probably thinking, do I really want that thing? Not everybody wants to do that.
The two most commercially successful Bonds were the youngest at debut. Connery had a nine-year run from 32. Craig ran from 38 to 53 across five films and $3.97 billion in box office. Moore made seven films but was visibly ageing out by the end.
4. A working professional with real films behind them
Playing Bond is a hard gig, both on- and off-screen. Long-press tours, multi-year shoots, action choreography, and the requirement to anchor a film against an A-list villain.
The clearest description of what this means in practice comes from Debbie McWilliams, the casting director who has been with the franchise since Roger Moore and personally cast Dalton, Brosnan and Craig. She told SlashFilm:
He has to look like a regular guy. You can’t be Dwayne Johnson. He has to have a great physique, but he shouldn’t stand out in any situation. You feel a very strong presence in the room with him, and I think that is incredibly important.
In my filtering, I opted to look at people with at least three feature film credits, although obviously, a real casting director can take a more nuanced view on who is able to take on the mantle.
The soft requirements
Once we apply these filters, there are fewer than 500 candidates left. We’re still at the point where we couldn’t call them all in for a casting session, but we could start a spreadsheet.
The hard requirements give us a list of professional actors, and now we can use soft requirements to surface people we might otherwise overlook.
Although data can give us pretty and definitive-looking charts and tables, we are firmly in the ‘Cosplaying as a Casting Director’ territory at this point. It’s a fun thing to make YouTube content with, but let’s not confuse this with hard science.
For example, acting ability is important here. Bond isn’t a dumb 80s action thriller where we can overlook the leads' acting because of the size of their quads or how often they can do the splits. A real casting director will know in seconds whether the actor is the worst thing in a good film or the best thing in a directionless one. But the data can’t see this kind of thing.
So let’s see what we can measure to reorder the candidates in interesting ways.
1. Has prestige
The actor who takes on Bond will need to have a certain amount of heavyweight prestige about them. They can’t be a silly Adam Sandler / Kevin James type.
Looking at the Metascore of the movies each of our Bond-wannabes has been in, surfaces Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn, and Josh O’Connor.
When asked a couple of years ago about the role, Joseph Quinn said:
Yes, in fact I just did a Zoom with Barbara… It would be fucking stupid to say no that… But come on, it doesn’t even make sense to think about it.
2. Doesn’t often feel miscast
Another signal we might look at is how well the actor has convinced the public in their previous roles. I pulled audience reviews and tracked mentions of “miscast”, “wrong for the role”, “unconvincing”, “didn’t fit” with each actor.
This could just be a case of not being cast correctly in the past, or it could be a signal that audiences are unsure about them.
An actor flagged as miscast might be miscast for a specific film because the casting director picked the wrong vehicle. Or because the director did not get a performance out of them. Or because they have not yet found their niche.
Even with all those caveats, the fact that Callum Turner, the current bookies’ favourite, sits in the worst third of his peer group on miscast mentions might be a concern.
3. Lots of charisma
The third proxy is the strongest of the three because it is the one most directly about the actor. Using the same audience review corpus, I tracked counts of mentions of the actor alongside things like “charisma”, “magnetic”, “presence”, “star quality”, “commanding”, and similar euphemisms.
Jonathan Bailey and Aaron Talyor-Johnson came up top (with the latter having a long history of being linked to the Bond gig).
4. The right kind of famous
The perfect actor to play James Bond needs just the right amount of fame upon casting. Bond does not hire stars. Bond makes stars. McWilliams calls casting an unknown “a gift”.
For most lead roles, more fame is better as fame brings audiences, marketing, and secured financing. For Bond, fame above a threshold is a negative. They do need some basic level of fame so that audiences feel they have earned the role with a sense of gravitas (gone are the days of hiring a milkman to play Bond).
They also need to be affordable and controllable - two things that famous people are not. A famous star walks into the negotiation with leverage Amazon cannot compete with.
Bond casting is structurally closer to casting Harry Potter or Star Wars, in that you are not picking the actor someone is right now, you are picking the actor they are going to become.
For example, Tom Holland is a perfectly plausible Bond on every other criterion (except maybe height). He is also already in a Marvel contract that would constrain availability, already a household name, and already on his own profit participation deals. His audience is not Bond’s audience either. The studio loses leverage the moment they sit down with him.
The Daniel Craig Precedent (a.k.a. the Renée Zellweger Principle)
When Daniel Craig was announced on 14 October 2005, the internet had something close to a meltdown. He was blonde. He was 5’10”. His ears were “too prominent”. Two protest websites were launched within hours. Tabloids published photos of him in a life vest, struggling to get out of a speedboat. Den of Geek covered the backlash in detail.
Then Casino Royale opened to 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Craig’s five films grossed $3.97 billion. Skyfall became the first Bond film to cross a billion dollars.
The same thing happened five years earlier with a much less British example. When Renée Zellweger was cast as Bridget Jones in 2000, the British fanbase was furious. A Texan playing a national icon. Zellweger gained weight, mastered the accent, worked undercover in a London publishing house, and won the audience over. We do not now think of Bridget as miscast - we think of her as Bridget.
The rule has held for sixty years - Connery was not Fleming’s choice, Lazenby was not anyone’s choice, and Craig was too blond. You could argue that the audience does not know what it wants until you show it. And every time the producers have made a casting choice that contradicted public expectation, the franchise has thrived.
The $2.8 trillion elephant in the room
This is the part of the problem that the data cannot solve. The casting decision lies at the intersection of two shopping lists. The audience wants their Bond. Amazon wants their franchise. Those are not the same thing.
Audiences want a Bond they recognise the moment he walks on screen, someone who feels like a continuation of the canon rather than a hard reset. He has to look the part, with the kind of bearing and physical presence the role demands, and light up a room the second he enters.
Amazon wants someone cheap to sign, because the franchise is the star and the actor is replaceable. They want someone willing to commit to a TV universe of spin-offs, not just two films and out. They want an actor who’ll tolerate director-led work without demanding the final cut, and who’ll stay available and under contract for the next decade.
The person who satisfies both columns is likely to be British, male, in his late twenties or early thirties, charismatic and properly trained, a working actor who isn’t yet a star, and someone who takes direction rather than fights it.
The true overlap among those people is no more than a handful. A source close to production told Deadline last year that:
99.9% of the names speculated online so far won’t make the cut.
Gun to the head….
I think it would be rather unsatisfying if I ended this article without proffering some names I think could be Bond.
Rather than making a subjective or artistic judgment, I’ll tell you what the numbers say.
At the time I was researching the video at the top of this article, the frontrunner was Callum Turner, with odds which imply he had already been cast. In my data, he scored pretty poorly. He has the third-highest miscast rate in the famous shortlist, and sits near the upper end of the casting age window.
If I had to pick someone who scores well but is priced badly by the bookies, it would be Tom Glynn-Carney. 31 years old, six foot one, a graduate of Guildhall, average film Metascore 65.2 and with a Wikipedia footprint of a quarter of a million pageviews (so known but a tenth of Tom Holland’s numbers). He has the shape of every Broccoli-era casting decision the producers have made.
Other top choices the data liked were Fionn Whitehead, Joseph Quinn, and Nabhaan Rizwan.
But any tweak to the criteria would massively change the order. Reweight charisma by even a few percentage points and Jonathan Bailey or Taylor-Johnson is on top. Decide that fame is a positive signal rather than a negative one, and Holland leads. Drop the British requirement, and Jacob Elordi is your Bond.
Bond casting is not really a maths problem. The producers are looking for the right unformed clay who walks into the room with the right ingredients, and who they can write a script for, build a film around, and brand for a decade. Oh, and who they can afford and control.
While data gives us fun candidates to consider, this kind of decision is only ever made by a small number of people over coffee in a private room.