I don’t want to turn this into a 007 thread, but I pose this scenario:
Supposedly Timothy Dalton was considered for Bond when Sean Connery quit after “YOLT”, but was rejected for being too young. Imagine if Dalton had been chosen as Bond and Brosnan hadn’t been hamstrung by NBC back in the mid 80s? We would have had good/great Bonds seamlessly in place for decades.
I do stick up for Roger Moore though, because most of the scripts he had to work with were garbage. Whoever followed Connery was going to have that reality to deal with; Connery did have the luxury of working with the cream of the crop, script-wise.
I think Moore was excellent in the few serious bits they gave him, like pimp slapping Maud Adams and tipping that dude’s car off a cliff. Wasn’t his fault the writing sucked.
“Supposedly Timothy Dalton was considered for Bond when Sean Connery quit after “YOLT”, but was rejected for being too young.”
That is true. And he was supposed to do Goldeneye (it was written for him, his first movie TLD was written Moore’s Bond and had to be butched up), I love Goldeneye and think it would have been ever better with him.
Dalton was considered, but apparently he took himself out of the running because he didn’t feel mature enough for the role.