Bond Supervillains

As I mentioned here in my review of Quantum of Solace, the wife and I are moderate fans of the Bond movies. Which means if there’s a marathon on TBS or TNT or one of those middle-of-the-spectrum channels, we’ll watch ’em. She tends to favor Connery, I trend towards Moore. We both like Brosnan, though he was kinda safe and a little bit boring. We’re both intrigued with the possibilities of Daniel Craig. While not experts on the subject, we’re pretty well-versed.

Just the other day I was chatting with a neighbor about Bond villains. While I think Daniel Craig is a good Bond to jump-start the series, the lack of really, really bad baddies can hurt it. I call now, officially, for a moratorium on these anonymous Euroweenies, with their daring plots to “monopolize the global manganese market.” Please. Has any of the recent Bond screenwriters seen You Only Live Twice? Moonraker? Heck, I’d even take a revenge plot like that in The Living Daylights and a bad guy like Franz Sanchez.

So over the years I’ve been griping, mostly to the long-suffering wife, about who would make the ideal Bond supervillain. So I finally bit the bullet and came up with a short list. A top ten. Now, a lot of these have about a 0.00037 chance of ever happening. Probably most. Some of these castings probably shouldn’t. But at least it’s better than the greasy metrosexuals we’ve seen trying rather ineffectively to try to kill Mr. Bond.


My criteria:

A Bond villain should be bad. No scruples, no morals, but not in a cartoonish or overtly evil way. Something that walks the twitching tightrope between a Batman nemesis and Hannibal Lechter. Difficult to do, but can be done.

A Bond villain also needs some distinguishing characteristic. For example, a scarred face, a bald head, prosthetic body parts, funny wardrobe that you’d dare not make fun of lest you wind up on the bottom of a shark tank. All have been done. I think Blofeld has a monopoly on those four qualities. Weird hair is good, too. Think of red-haired Auric Goldfinger and silver-haired Max Zorin. Whatever the quality, a Bond supervillain can’t be commonplace. You shouldn’t expect to see him in an Amstel Light commercial.

So who are my candidates?


Here’s the top ten:

10. Vince Vaughn

Okay, okay. I realize I’ve just strained my credibility right here at the outset. This is an idealized pick. Imagine Vince if Vince never hooked up with Will Ferrell to complete his transformation into cartoony comedy. Imagine if Double V continued taking roles similar to his turn as Norman Bates in the Psycho remake. That’s all I’m sayin.’

9. Seal

All right. Hear me out. At the risk of sounding inconsiderate, the man just looks like a badass. That’s all I’m going to say. If he can act, all the more better.

8. Tom Sizemore

If this guy could ever get his act together, he’d be the perfect Bond supervillain. Slightly psychologically unhinged, physically dominating, charismatic, I could just picture his character’s cult of personality bringing together a corps of uniform-wearing henchman to … I don’t know … melt the polar ice caps to throw the Earth out of its orbit unless his demands were met. I like it.

7. Henry Rollins

Rollins is a force of nature. Tattooed, ripped and shredded, anger as an art form. Could play a thug who murders his way up the chain of command. Give him a robotic arm or something. Maybe a red metal eye, to call subconscious comparison to a Terminator. Could work.

6. David Caruso

Stop! I know, I know, I know. But the guy has a weird personality, a weird raspy voice, and some seriously weird hair going on. And he’s like an albino or something. As long as he can stretch out of that NYPD/Miami CSI groove he’s been in for a thousand years. Think about it. There’s possibilities. But no sunglasses – Bond supervillains don’t were sunglasses, unless their eyes are different colors or have telephoto lenses in them or bleed blood.

5. Ben Kingsley

He’s bald. He’s an accomplished actor. He’s an Oscar winner. Okay, he may be too big for the role, but what a performance he’d put into his villain! Ever see Gandhi? Well, forget that. See him as Don Logan in Sexy Beast. That’s the Ben Kingsley that would be on display here. Pure psychotic intelligence, drive, ambition, always on the edge of imbalance. A supervillain who will not take no for an answer.

4. Michael Chiklis

He’s also bald, and he can also pull out that psychotic intelligence, drive and ambition from pit of the barren hell that is his soul. Think of the teevee show The Shield. Ben Kingsley light, but I think he’d fit the role better. More physical. He’d be more hungry for it.

3. Dennis Quaid

All right, my wife hates this choice. But I think it’s so off the wall it might work. Dennis has this quality in his eyes that gives me the impression that he can easily portray … oh … say, megalomaniacally mad. Plus, no Bond villain has got that Texas twang. You could begin the movie with some nefarious plot about oil, blah blah blah, but that’s only a ruse to throw the audience off, because that’s easy to do to a lazy audience. It’d really be about biotechnology or time travel or something much more SF-ish than futures commodities.

2. Willem Dafoe

The face alone begs to join the ranks of Blofeld, Scaramanga, Stromfeld, Zorin, Largo. That face has made millions and a career for Mr. Dafoe. He’s the perfect Bond supervillain. However, his role as the goblin in Spiderman may make this ideal choice impossible. But I would wager anything that at some point in his career the Broccoli family approached him to “talk” about possibly taking up the bad guy mantle. For some reason I see him masterminding an evil plot to clone important or wealthy individuals throughout the world to bring him unlimited riches and power. He’d clone Bond, too, so Daniel Craig would have to do hand-to-hand with – Daniel Craig. And when Craig dispatches Dafoe at the end of the movie, we’ll never be certain whether it was the original or a clone who got off’ed.

1. Geoffrey Rush

Everything said above plus more. Intelligent, crafty, clever, unscrupulous and inscrutable. A Dafoe-ish face with unkempt hair. Indications of insanity, but controlled insanity. A compact physicality about him that would make it possible to whip some martial arts on James. And perhaps the best actor of the whole bunch.


Well, don’t be shy: What do you think?