Which Bond Actor is Closest to the Books? | Ranking James Bond Actors | Most Fleming 007

good evening mr bond fans while i personally think that there is a slightly different criteria for what makes a great cinematic bond over say a great novel bond there are an awful lot of bond fans out there for whom the closer to the ian fleming literary creation the cinematic actor is the better of course it was ian fleming's books that started this whole empire of double 07. so it makes sense that purists will want to see the well purest version of double 07 represented on screen in this video i'll be ranking the bonds according to how closely i think they are to fleming's initial creation but i do want to point out upfront that this is really not as clear-cut a thing as i was anticipating i think that most people shooting the opinion from the hip if you will would generally agree that timothy dalton is the purest version of fleming's character put to screen and certainly when i started planning this video i went into it thinking well it's obviously dalton but to say that is to say that fleming's james bond is represented consistently throughout his writings and that's not really the case nor is it the case that bond actors give creatively consistent performances throughout their 10 years i mean connery's bond for instance is very different in doctor know that he is in diamonds are forever so we'll get into this a bit more as we go through um in the video but i do want to make it clear off the bat that this was far less of a going through the motions exercises i thought it was going to be so we're going to start at the bottom of the list now with the actor whom i think is furthest away from ian fleming's creation and just as an fyi before we go in i'm not going to be counting barry nelson or david niven in this poll mainly because i don't feel like it's fair to compare the 50s tv bond in the 60s spoof bond with the main series actors in this way i think it's an interesting aside that niven was at the top of fleming's own list of potential bond actors when it came to casting the part for doctor no but the performance that we get from the actor in the casino house booth is obviously a comedic performance if he were to actually to do bond seriously i expect he would have played it very differently for nelson playing bond was very much just a gig on a tv play by his own admission he'd never even heard of the character or read any of the books so again it just doesn't feel right to include him in the main list but to suffice it to say um both of these actors would rank below the main six anyway so with that bit of housekeeping out of the way let's get on with the list initially my instinct was to put roger moore at the bottom of this list but really when it came to thinking about truly fleming moments that each bond actor has had throughout their 10 years the one that came out lowest for me was actually my personal second favorite bond of them all pierce brosnan this is certainly not a slight on the actor i think he's a terrific cinematic bond and he's at a disadvantage against the other five given that he's the bond with the least scenes and moments lifted directly from an ian fleming text all of the other bonds have at least a film or a handful of scenes that are directly adapted from the original texts and this goes a long way to helping them feel suitably true to the source material brosnan is kind of without that he has his moments though don't get me wrong the scene where he's waiting in his hotel room and tomorrow dies is probably something of a fleming highlight of his entire tenure though i'd make a case with the world is not enough being his most close to feeling like the original source material character probably because it plays on bond falling in love and into the more vulnerable aspects of the character of which there is an awful lot in fleming i know there's a reputation that it's all gritty and dark smoky casinos etc but fleming's bond is seriously lovelorn for a good deal of the first few books in the series and later on as well moonraker in particular has always stood out for me as bond is effectively stood up by his prospective romantic partner at the end of that story and it's a far cry from what we see from a lot of the cinematic versions of the character i think pierce is an absolutely brilliant cinematic bond but i think it's clear from his performance that he's clearly channeling more what previous actors have done rather than what ian fleming created as i say you know i was very influenced by the work of roger moore and sean connery and i allowed that influence to come into the work i didn't censor it i had the greatest respect for both both actors and their portrayal is bombed and fleming's work is not that insightful really to the the inner workings of bond casino royal really is the blueprint for the character so despite my own fondness for brosnan and i really really really do love the guy i can't emphasize that enough but the lack of faithfully adapted fleming material in any of his four films as well as his own lack of familiarity with the source material gives his films and performances less of a fleming edge than his contemporaries for me pointing yes my own personal favorite bond actor ranks the second lowest here and i don't think many would disagree with me on this though the act himself did admit to taking some inspiration from fleming's writing so i sort of read a couple of books and one of them it said that bond had returned from mission somewhere he had killed but he didn't like killing so that's why i played it somebody really didn't like doing it roger's performances as bond were largely very much him doing his usual roger charming affable stuff that you see throughout his filmography and though i think he's a much underrated performer and one that didn't even give himself nearly enough credit he would admit that he never really thought of himself as a terribly dramatic actor he certainly was not a method actor who would get lost in the character or anything like that and for a good deal of the films he was in that approach was totally fine as i say he's my favorite bond i absolutely adore the guy but for the most part his performance is quite far away from what ian fleming put to the page at least for the most part i think more gives the harder edged performances in both the man with the golden gun and theorize only the latter being the most fleming let's say of his seven films largely because it featured the most faithfully adapted sequences of the author's works and the general direction of that film was to go back to the books back to the source material and i think that moore does a great job even if he himself didn't like doing much of the colder things like kicking the baddie's car off a cliff although it's bond i thought it was a bit unrudger more bond to be that vicious to kick a car over with somebody in the man with the golden gun is his bond at his most cruel and serious you're not thinking i sure am boy well most of the time yet i never think of his golden gun performance as being terribly fleming-like there's a crassness to him in that film that i've never really gelled with curiously i find more's most fleming moments come in a couple of his later films and peoria is only as i previously mentioned and a few moments in octopussy too more has an advantage over brosnan obviously because he made more films than brosnan did and so had more opportunities to portray the character with a more fleming edge whether that was conscious on his part or whether director john glenn was coaxing such a performance out of him but i think moore's performance matured into fleming territory which feels to be the reverse of what happened with sean connery but more on that in a little while now conversely to the point that i just made about more having more films and there's more opportunities to display more fleming feeling aspects of the character it's saying something that george laserey actually managed to achieve something as faithful to the character as he did in just a single film lazenby had read the fleming novel on which her majesty's secret service the film is relatively faithfully adapted from and direct peter hunt was very adamant on sticking as close to the source material as possible so all the ingredients were there for a quintessential fleming bond performance and ladies and gentlemen nails some of the characters more vulnerable moments and the final scene where he's cradling his dead wife is touching and emotional and indeed throughout the whole film lazenby's bond feels much more human than what conor's bond had become in the preceding film i have no doubt that some people would cite him as being the most close to ian fleming's creation and i can totally understand and appreciate that and that's why you know this ranking is it's difficult when you have someone like george lazenby who was only in one film and you have someone like roger moore who was in seven and just has more opportunities to display more fleming-like traits over a length of time whereas george lazenby only had the one opportunity to many people i think lazenby might well stand as the most faithful to fleming's creation and it would have been really interesting to see where they would have gone with him in the party if he had have done more films after majesties i've always found lazenby's performance to be a bit on the wooden side so it has been interesting to see how he might have been on say his third or fourth film and whether his trajectory would have taken him away from fleming to play to more of his own personality like what happened with a couple of the other bonds or whether he would have stayed close to the source material but for what it's worth for his single shot at the character lazenby did a really admirable job and in third position on this list we have huh well that was that was pretty weird sorry let me try again in third position we have sean mother craig sorry i can't seem to quite spit out the words let me try again diminol conradon yeah sorry folks this is where i'm gonna have to break from the usual format a bit this video has taken me so long to put together largely because i honestly don't know which of these three i'd pick as being closer to fleming's version of james bond when i initially went into this i was like well it's obviously dalton but then i'd be thinking about this video in the shower and i'd be all but she'll be a samuel craigsbond that has the greatest emotional intensity of all of them and then i'd be thinking in the kitchen and i'd be like conor's performance certainly veered away from fleming and goldfinger but surely those first two performances are about as textbook flooding as it gets then i'd be trying to get to sleep at night thinking about this video and i'd be all for god's sake calvin stop trying to be so deliberately contrarian and just admit that timothy dalton is ian fleming's james bond i've gone around and around and around with these three in my head for a variety of reasons and while i will rank them in a placement at the end of this video i want to talk about all three of them together and emphasize the point that i think that this is an incredibly close race and part of the reason why i think it's so close is that each of the actors do nail various aspects of fleming's bond and again if you go back if you read the fleming novels the bond character can change and he is inconsistent from entry to entry people talk about the gritty realism of the fleming books and it's like yes but also let's not pretend that they don't go fantastical and high concept in places that giant squid that attacks bond at the end of doctor no that bit in moonraker where a nuclear warhead goes off on the south coast of england various world domination blowfield plots and let me make this clear i'm not citing these things as negatives at all but i think the wider public perception of fleming's bond is more defined by casino royale the book than anything else the hard-faced man in the smoky casino but that's really just an aspect of fleming's character i think when people define fleming's bond they're really just defining the bond of casino royale and overlooking the fact that the character does somewhat shift and evolve from story to story maybe it's just because most people have probably read casino royale and think that that gives them just enough of an overview of fleming's character but certainly from dr noah onwards he becomes a bit of a wisecracker and he's making jokes and the plots are a bit more fantastical so when it comes to judging let's say sean connery's performance in dr no i think that's probably the purest book to screen translation in the entire series it helps that doctor know spends a lot of time showcasing the character and we get an awful lot of the lifestyle moments that are a highlight of a lot of fleming's books with the character you know where he buys his clothes what he eats what he drinks and so on there are signature moments galore with bond playing cards and smoking in the casino the cold killing of professor dent and i think his performance extends into from russia with love in that same respect as well i think his performance in those two films are very much cut from the same cloth in doctor in particular you see connery processing what he's doing the inner workings of his mind are visible on his face it feels like he's translating the internal monologue of the character that we read in the book he feels like a hardened spy the methodical nature in which he does things from goldfinger onwards connery's performance starts to lean away from fleming and more into the actor's own natural charms and charisma and it's all great stuff i think his performance in goldfinger is phenomenal and a defining cinematic bond performance but it does somewhat overshadow the performances from his first two films which i think are perhaps a bit more reserved in comparison with his successive performances and that's not to say that his subsequent films do not have their fair share of plumbing moments and it helps that on a whole his films are adapting more directly from fleming than some others the fact is that while i was reading through the ian fleming books a good few years ago some of them for the first time of all the cinematic bonds the one that i was envisioning the most when i was reading the book was connery though admittedly most of the time i was envisioning something of an original character somewhat similar to that daily express illustration so on the two movie front we of course have timothy dalton who gets major props for really coming at this character from a hugely considered and respectful angle dalton read all of the books and had a lot of very specific notes and opinions about how the films should be and how they should approach the character i intend to approach this project with a sense of uh responsibility to the work of ian fleming and to the project the film the living daylights as written uh by michael and richard mabon i think the essential quality of james bond is that he's a man who lives on the edge you never know he never knows when at any moment he might be killed therefore i think some of the qualities we associate with bond the qualities we've seen in this series of movies the qualities that ian fleming wrote so well about uh reflect that sense of danger in his own life we know that uh uh he drinks lines like shaken not stirred reflect that uh a sense of drinking we know he smokes we know uh he likes to drive fast cars i think the qualities of uh the qualities of the man are the qualities of a man who is living very much on the edge of his life he certainly gets my vote for being of all the cinematic bonds the one who probably put in the most effort and really came at this from a very serious and grounded angle and it helps the the living daylights and license to kill both feature sequences and moments directly lifted from fleming's works dalton brings ruthlessness and emotional weight in spades but he is at a disadvantage because he really only has two films for us to go on if those third or potentially fourth dalton films had happened how would his performance have stacked up against some of the rumored plot lines for those films like if he was going up against robot assassins i mean would the would they interpret the lukewarm critical reaction to license to kill as a reason for him to go less dark with his performance who knows it's really difficult to tell how if he had done more films would that have affected his overall standing it's also very difficult to imagine dalton working as bond as represented in some of the later fleming's like i say in the novel dr no bond has had much greater sense of humor than previously and it's hard to imagine a dalton bond performance working with that but it is incredibly easy to see his style working in something like casino royale and that whole sniper sequence in the living daylights is just it just oozes fleming bond it's really phenomenal i think his best performance though is in license to kill where he is really given the opportunity to act and showcase some of the emotional intensity that people love him for and the higher age rating of the film also allows him some cold and brutal moments and he absolutely nails it every time then we come to craig and him being the most recent bond and already seemingly enduring the backlash that the incumbent bonds often seem to get towards the end of their 10 years i think he's probably the most controversial of the three options here i'm sure a good deal of people will just write him off because he doesn't have the same physicality as described by fleming in the books but it doesn't register as an issue for me i'm talking about character here and to quibble about whether or not the actor has the correct hair color feels like a bit of a trivial point but yes daniel craig now if timothy dalton is at a disadvantage then craig is really at an advantage over his fellow bonds his films have been so much more focused on character than ever before in his entire 10 years shaping up to be one big arc which none of his predecessors were really afforded he also has the luxury of having casino royale to act in which for many people represents the definitive version of fleming's bond on the page and craig translates that performance to film wonderfully despite that though i'd say there's actually something about his skyfall performance that feels like it's the most fleming to me probably because it plays into a lot of bonds moodiness and malaise particularly in the first half of the film it reminds me a lot of the characters melancholy that exists in fleming's uranus twice for instance and moments in diamonds are forever in the novel that is i think in that film more than any other the moody bond is really captured the cynicism is there in the performance and that's really a massive part of fleming's bond and i think craig captures that really well in that particular film however craig's performances in quantum assaults inspector read farless flemingy for me i in quantum i feel like he's almost too angry throughout and i get that yes he's out for revenge after the death of vesper but given the in the books in living that dionyan lived twice um the stories that follow the deaths of vesper and tracy respectively those events send bond into more of a depression more of a pathetic discontent than like going on a rage and killing everyone though that does come later in you and live twice i feel his spectre performance is his version of the cinematic bond that we all think of as being super charming and suave and cool and flippant and all of that i see that more as craig doing a version of connery's bonding goldfinger though than fleming's bond though as i say with casino royale and skyfall i think he hits pretty fantastic highs that being said i am committed to coming out of this with some kind of order so if i absolutely had to put them in some kind of ranking i guess craig would be third second would be connery and yeah first would be timothy dalton i think ultimately it does have to be dalton because of all the aspects of fleming's bond that he nails he really nails when he is at peak fleming he is above the rest of them and again while i think that the living daylights has a greater fleming feel as an overall film it is his performance in license to kill that really stands out it's a great shame that we didn't get more from him for connery dr noah and from russia with love are no doubt him at his peak fleming and i think dr no stands as his best fleming bond performance but it is inevitably diluted by his later performances which awesome though they are do stray away somewhat from the source material and lean more into the actor's own charisma craig as i say has some terrific highs and he's an advantage given that his 10 years bond has undertaken a more thoughtful and deliberate approach to the character than what we'd seen previously but i think dalton and connery just excel a bit better than him so there we go please do let me know your own rankings for most fleming like bond in the comment section below i have a feeling there is going to be very much a timothy dalton-centric consensus on this but i'm curious to know if this is even like is this even a question for you did you have to grapple as i did with this ranking like i say i kind of thought this was going to be more of like a rudimentary kind of process but uh really really getting into the nitty-gritty of it really thinking about this it was yeah really not as half as easy as i thought it was going to be so yeah please do let me know your thoughts below and also below you can click the subscribe button and the misses bell button to stay up to date on future video uploads that i'm going to be making on this channel also below links to my social media pages including my facebook page my twitter page and my patreon page for those of you who want to go one extra step in supporting this channel so with all that being said and until next time bond fans so long for now

Channel: Calvin Dyson

Views: 211,869

Keywords: James Bond, 007, Review, Reviews, Video Essay, Analysis, Vlogger, Vlog, Vlogging, Movies, Films, No Time To Die, Daniel Craig, Spectre, Skyfall, Quantum of Solace, Casino Royale, Die Another Day, The World is Not Enough, Tomorrow Never Dies, GoldenEye, Licence to Kill, The Living Daylights, A View to a Kill, Octopussy, Moonraker, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Man With the Golden Gun, Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever, Goldfinger, Thunderball, Dr No, Ian Flemming, Reaction

Id: jzPoezL_yB0

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021