Debbie McWilliams joined the James Bond juggernaut in the early 1980s as casting director, picking actors from the top of the bill to the bottom. Her first film was Octopussy in 1983, her last No Time to Die in 2021. That is 38 years of experience and it was McWilliams who, alongside the Bond supremos Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, cast Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. To many, McWilliams was the real M — the brains behind the man we got to see on screen.
And now she has retired in what is a possibly terminal time for 007 as we know him, after last week’s announcement that Broccoli and Wilson, her half-brother, had ceded creative control of the franchise to Amazon MGM Studios.
McWilliams said her decision to retire was made before Amazon took control of MGM — and therefore Bond — in 2022, but rumors of discontent had been rife. It has been suggested that Broccoli took umbrage when one Amazon executive referred to the films as “content” and another worker said they did not consider the character a hero.
Having stood firm against several suggestions, Broccoli has now gone — breaking the link with Dr. No, the very first Bond movie, which her father Cubby produced in 1962. McWilliams’s departure effectively leaves the character in the hands of people who have never made a Bond film.
“It definitely feels like the end of an era,” McWilliams said, rather sadly. “I don’t really know what happens next — I just hope [Amazon] don’t lose everything that’s good about it, and hold on to its tradition. Maybe they want to take it in a completely different direction, but I just hope it never loses its Britishness. Barbara was born into Bond’s mythology and it should keep that angle — but I’m not sure if it’s going to feel quite the same again.”
It already feels less classy. A few hours after the announcement that his company had taken control, Jeff Bezos tweeted, above a news story headlined “James Bond’s long-serving producers give control to Amazon”: “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?”
“That’s where my heart sank,” McWilliams said. “If we had done anything like [canvass opinion for who should play the role], Daniel [Craig] would never have been Bond. You know, he started off very unpopular, before anybody had even seen an inch of footage. He had such negative press.”
Did McWilliams know if any conversations had taken place about who might replace Craig? “No, to be totally honest,” she said. “Between films, I see Barbara socially, but we don’t talk about anything to do with the films.”
Broccoli, she added, “has many other irons in the fire. Bond’s a huge job to undertake and as we’ve all got a lot older, you have to have the most incredible amount of enthusiasm to keep up. I’m sure she probably has some sense of relief.”
The first film McWilliams worked on was the 1979 Vanessa Redgrave film Agatha. “It is the only job I’ve ever done, extraordinarily,” she said. “That was it — my fate was sealed and off I went.”
Being a casting director means reading through a script and figuring out what actors will suit what roles, she explained, and then seeing if they are available and how much they will cost. The director picks the casting director and then “relies very strongly on your knowledge of and taste in actors”, she added.
It is a key and underrated position whose importance was finally acknowledged by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2020, when it created a Bafta award for best casting. McWilliams is proudest of her work with the film director Derek Jarman, “or getting to know actors when they were very young, like Gary Oldman. For My Beautiful Laundrette, I had seen Daniel Day-Lewis at Bristol Old Vic and thought, ‘Well, you know, he is it!’ And we became friends so I saw him in a play about Dracula. He’d dyed his hair blond and it was growing out by the time he did Laundrette — it was perfect.”
She has endless Bond anecdotes, explaining how Dalton was cast only when Brosnan had to pull out because of filming commitments on Remington Steele, and how, when they were casting Casino Royale, they had no baddie and so McWilliams, in Prague, tracked down Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, who happened to be there too, and cast him sharpish as Le Chiffre.
And why did they pick Craig — whose first film was Casino Royale? “He was a breath of fresh air,” McWilliams said. “Pierce felt very much like a romantic lead and Daniel doesn’t play that style at all. He’s much more aggressive, playing more of the cold-hearted killer that [Ian] Fleming wrote, but had turned into something slightly different under Roger Moore. Daniel just felt far more contemporary.”
McWilliams worked on 13 Bond films and the Broccolis had their name on all 27, but all this knowledge has now vanished, to be replaced by algorithm-driven tech bros who could conceivably end up turning 007 into a Texan frat boy with a TikTok account. “The continuity was incredibly helpful,” McWilliams said with a sigh.
McWilliams said she would miss the feeling of being part of a team, but not the rise of self-taped auditions that have crept in post-Covid, or the messages from men — who aren’t even actors — who think they should be the next Bond. “I’ve had some very odd emails,” she said, laughing. “But I have other interests! That’s not the be-all and end-all of my life.”
The big question is how long she thinks it will be until we have a new Bond film. She crunches the likelihood: casting, shooting, post-production, release … “I can’t imagine a new film coming out for at least two years,” she said. “We wait with bated breath.”
Jonathan Dean is a senior writer at the Sunday Times Culture section and the author of I Must Belong Somewhere: Three Men. Two Migrations. One Endless Journey
