Jack O'Connell for the next James Bond? Try next Bond villain

The Aston Martin race for the next James Bond is nearing its finish line. Casting has been underway for many months — and producer Amy Pascal has said that an announcement by “the end of the year” would be a “good bet.” Even as we come close to the end, names are being bandied around like clicky-pen grenades. The latest? British filmmaking legend Danny Boyle has thrown his weight behind Jack O'Connell , the former Skins actor who has recently had a mega pop culture resurgence via his roles in Boyle's 28 Years Later and the Oscar-winning vampire thriller Sinners . “They should cast Jack O'Connell as Bond,” said Boyle, speaking at the Zurich Film Festival, where his new film Ink — a biopic about the birth of The Sun newspaper, starring O'Connell as devilish editor Larry Lamb — was played. It's quite the endorsement: not only from a British directorial legend, but from the guy who was originally set to helm Daniel Craig's 007 swansong No Time to Die in 2021. (Boyle departed the film allegedly due to creative differences with the series' then-producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, plus Craig himself, per Variety . ) You can see the vision: O'Connell has plenty of the aesthetic traits one might want of a modern Bond, in that he is handsome, cuts a suave image on red carpets (even when his mouth is full of grisly fangs, such as with his vampiric look at the Academy Awards earlier this year), and seems like he could take on plenty of scraps with world-threatening evildoers. So too can the rest of the world, it seems, with O'Connell having emerged last month as a popular candidate on the prediction markets, currently third on Kalshi behind long-time favourites Jack Lowden and Callum Turner. Craig himself brought a brooding, enigmatic quality to Bond that surfaced the superspy's inner darkness — and O'Connell, who has cemented himself as a go-to Hollywood bad guy , would be an ideal pick for bringing out more of that edge. He'd be a welcome choice. But there's one role that, for our money, he'd kill all the more: the next Bond villain . For starters, look at his work on Sinners , in which he played the Irish vampire Remmick, a wandering menace who scours the ‘50s Deep South with his bloodsucking friends, manipulating poor saps into letting him chow down on their jugulars. At first, Remmick comes across as disarmingly friendly, your archetypal good neighbour, with his big smiles and plucky banjo-playing — give him an acoustic guitar, and he could be the indie-glazing bloke who plays “Wonderwall” on your first night at uni halls. But there's fire in those soulful eyes: on a basic level, you just want to run, overplayed tunes be damned. And when O'Connell hasn't been killing it as the most sinister (and weirdly sexy) vampire this side of Bill Skarsgård's Nosferatu, he has lit up the screen in those aforementioned 28 Years Later movies, not least 2026 sequel The Bone Temple . In them he plays a maniacal cult leader in the image of Jimmy Savile , all bleach-blonde wigs, velour tracksuits and a magpie's nest worth of gold rings. There, especially, O'Connell draws upon an inner savagery that makes your blood run cold — a showcase of his gnarly, brutal edge. It would probably be best advised that the next Bond film doesn't also have a Savile-style villain, but these are still pitch-black traits that O'Connell could draw upon, and to brilliant effect. And it's not like O'Connell only aces the most archly villainous tropes; he has a superpower for making his monsters feel human. Just take it from Boyle, who spoke to this idea in Zurich. “I thought he should play Larry Lamb [in Ink ], because he's weird,” the director said. “Despite the fact he's playing a monster, you're still interested in him. You're still intrigued by him, and he doesn't repel you.” The best Bond villains, after all, are morally complex, or at least somewhat sympathetic. (See GoldenEye 's former double-O Alec Trevelyan, played by Sean Bean, whose tragic backstory of his parents being murdered as Lienz Cossacks made him, and his relationship with Bond, far more compelling.) Of the current crop of actors out there, few are so adept at playing in this super-sinister mode. Could O'Connell leverage that for a darker take on 007? It would work. But he could also make for the freakiest Bond villain yet.