What the data says about who should be the next James Bond

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. 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 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 gr…