Twenty years ago this week, a blond actor many fans had loudly rejected walked into the Odeon Leicester Square as James Bond. Casino Royale premiered in London on November 14, 2006, opened in British cinemas on November 16 and reached US screens a day later. It went on to gross more than $606 million worldwide and reset 007 for a new century.
The film was the 21st Bond picture from Eon Productions and the first with Daniel Craig in the tuxedo. It was also the first to break from the series’ old loose continuity: Bond starts the story as a newly promoted 00 agent, rough at the edges and very easy to hurt.
The casting fight before a single frame
Eon announced Craig as the sixth screen Bond on October 14, 2005, introducing him on the Thames by Royal Marines boat near HMS Belfast. The backlash was instant. Online campaigns threatened a boycott, and critics complained he was too short, too blond and not the tall, dark type audiences expected.
The producers had looked hard. More than 200 actors were considered, with the list cut to 10. Director Martin Campbell later said Henry Cavill was the only other serious contender, but at 22 he was judged too young. Craig, by his own account, was exhausted at his screen test after flying in from another shoot, saying “my eyes were just swimming”. Producer Barbara Broccoli championed him anyway.
Craig also refused a request to dye his hair brown, calling it “out of the question”, and suggested a short cut for a harder look instead.
Back to Fleming, and back to real stunts
After the invisible car and ice palace of Die Another Day in 2002, Eon wanted something grounded. Screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, joined later by Paul Haggis, stayed close to Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel, swapping the Cold War villains for Le Chiffre, a banker who finances terrorists, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Haggis said the aim was “to do for Bond what Batman Begins did for Batman”.
The stunts were done mostly for real. Parkour pioneer Sébastien Foucan played the bomb maker Bond chases across a Madagascar building site, a sequence actually filmed in the Bahamas. Later, a stunt driver used an air cannon to flip an Aston Martin, and the car rolled seven times at more than 70 miles per hour, a feat the Guinness Book of Records confirmed as a world record in November 2006.
Casino Royale at 20, by the numbers
- 27 January 2006: filming starts in Prague; it wraps on 20 July at Pinewood Studios.
- $10 million: the buy-in for the Texas hold ’em game in Montenegro, with Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic standing in for the casino town.
- 7 rolls: the Aston Martin crash that set the record.
- 94%: its approval score on the main review aggregator, from 266 reviews.
- Six years: how long it held the title of top-grossing Bond film, until Skyfall passed it in November 2012.
Put those dates side by side and the turnaround is striking. Craig went from a front-page punchline in October 2005 to the face of the best-earning 007 film yet in roughly 13 months, and he kept the role for five films through No Time to Die in 2021.
Why it still matters for the next Bond
The reboot template Casino Royale set is exactly what the franchise faces again. With Amazon MGM now steering the series, Badiyaa has tracked what has been confirmed about Denis Villeneuve’s Bond film and why no new 007 has been officially named despite casting reports. Craig, meanwhile, has moved on to ventures such as a London pub with the founders of Soho House and Flat Iron.
The film’s own sign-off still lands two decades on. Bond shoots Mr. White in the leg at a lakeside estate on Lake Como and, for the first time in Craig’s run, says it in full: “The name’s Bond, James Bond.”
Further reading
Image: Montclair Film, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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