Bonding with James? How the villains ‘joust’ with 007

Now pay attention, 007. Why do some of James Bond’s enemies seek to be ‘friends’ with the MI6 agent? The word ‘frenemy’ was not invented for the Bond films, but there are some key moments over the course of the 25-film franchise when such a word seems very appropriate.

Dr. Julius No, for example, told Connery’s Bond in the very first 007 movie from EON, Dr. No (1962), that he thought there might be a place in SP.E.C.T.R.E. for our James, much to Bond’s disgust. Similarly, Christopher Lee’s Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) sought out Bond’s friendship by claiming they were both skilled assassins pursuing the same trade. Roger Moore’s 007 dismissed this with the classic line ‘There’s a useful four-letter word, and you’re full of it’. Bond explained that when he killed, it was under orders and for King and Country, whereas Scaramanga was, in essence, just a thug for hire. Scaramanga was left in no doubt that any ‘friendship’ was most definitely not wanted by Bond.

The tense chess-game or psychological ‘jousting’ that often occurs between Bond and the main villain has become a core feature of the Bond movies. ‘Jousting’ is a word from the Middle Ages, and has come to mean ‘confrontation’ in more modern times: Bond and the baddie will often engage in a battle of wills or minds, and often this also becomes more direct physical confrontation. On the other hand, a villain will often try to reach out and be a ‘friend’ to 007, perhaps out of respect or secret admiration, but the audience always knows that this is a false hand of friendship, as does Bond.

Quite often, a great villain will also have a very dependable henchman or two, someone who is just as evil or devious as the main baddie. Think, for example, of Oddjob, the highly dangerous and physically tough henchman to Auric Goldfinger, or Nick-Nack, the manipulative aid to Scaramanga, or Jaws, a steel-toothed killer working for Karl Stromberg, and then (briefly) for Hugo Drax, or Stamper, the cold-blooded hoodlum who worked for Elliot Carver, and so on.

The later Bruce Glover (who sadly passed away on 12th March, 2025) played the very sinister Mr. Wint, alongside Putter Smith as Mr. Kidd, in Diamonds Are Forever, and the audience was left with the strong impression that the pair would stop at nothing to finish off James Bond once and for all. Their guffaws as they left Bond in a coffin to be cremated alive epitomised villainy in all its warped glory. The scene on the ocean liner at the end of the movie, where Wint and Kidd make yet another attempt to kill 007, left us in no doubt that Blofeld’s demented duo of assassins were determined to fulfill their mission.

What Makes a Memorable Villain?

A memorable villain, of course, is an essential ingredient to any James Bond film, and finding out the nature of his or her dastardly scheme is part of the pleasure of the Bond cinema experience for the audience. A strong baddie, exuding malicious evil, gives us opportunities to hiss and boo the villain and cheer on 007 as he takes apart the deluded scheme of the latest heartless brute he has encountered (think Blofeld, Mr. Big, Stromberg, Drax, to name just a few). Occasionally a villain appears to get satisfaction from the way Bond follows the clues and pointers and works out the nature of the dastardly scheme. Gert Frobe’s Auric Goldfinger almost encourages Bond to fully grasp the enormity and implications of his plan to contaminate America’s gold supply with a small-scale ‘atomic device’ and, as they bond over drinks, appears delighted when Bond grudgingly compliments him on the ingenuity of the scheme.

Sometimes a Bond villain evidently enjoys showing off their ’empire’ to Bond. It’s as if they cannot resist boasting to 007, relishing the stage before they can quickly kill him off (or so they think!). A good example of this is Adolfo Celi’s Largo in Thunderball, who invites Bond to his Nassau luxury residence and they share ‘small talk’ beside Largo’s swimming-pool and engage in some competitive clay-shooting. The pool, of course, doubles up in reality as a shark-pool, something Bond has to endure when he returns back there late at night. There is nothing subtle about Largo – his cruelty is plain to see, in a pretty stark way.

But there are times when Bond film directors can play with the audience, and a Bond villain (or villainess) may not be all that he or she appears to be (this comes across strongly in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, and in 1983’s Octopussy). A number of the Bond villains have been highly intelligent and surprisingly nuanced in their ideas and behaviour. Moreover, the ego of a number of the main baddies in the 007 movies has been such that, when faced with an opponent of Bond’s stature and skills, they often end up having a grudging respect for our James, or seek to impress or even woo Bond with seemingly friendly talk.

This context has clearly influenced some of the actors who have taken on a ‘baddie’ role in the Bond franchise in recent years and who have carefully prepared for their role. Speaking in an interview he gave in September, 2020, and published in December that year in GQ magazine, Rami Malek said he believed Dr. No is the best of the Bond villains, and he especially loved the scene where Joseph Wiseman’s Julius No calls Sean Connery’s Bond ‘a stupid policeman’. As Bond fans know, this is shortly after Dr. No has tried to reach out to Bond, voicing his hope that, somehow, Bond could have been persuaded to defect and join SP.E.C.T.R.E. When Bond firmly rebuffs this idea, commenting that the only department he would like to join would be the ‘Revenge’ department, Dr. No realises that trying to persuade Bond to defect is a lost cause.

At one stage in No Time To Die the main villain Safin (played by Rami Malek) tries to persuade a highly sceptical James Bond that they are, in many ways, similar. Bond does not agree, of course.

Frayling’s Perspective

In 2015, Bond expert Christopher Frayling penned an essay on the world of the James Bond villains: ‘No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die’. The essay set out Frayling’s thoughts on how the 007 villains have reflected the anxieties of their age, and how they will continue to do so in the future. Written for the special summer edition of the UK’s New Statesman magazine (31 July – 13 August), Frayling’s essay started by recalling how the very first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), nearly had the main villain replaced by a pet monkey in the first draft screenplay written by Wolf Mankowitz and Richard Maibaum. Frayling noted how ‘Cubby’ Broccoli firmly rejected the ‘monkey’ plan contained in the first draft of the screenplay: the second draft of the treatment, dated 28 September, 1961, dropped the monkey and restored Dr. Julius No in all his villainous glory. As Broccoli said later, he was a great believer in not tampering with the original material i.e. in this case the highly distinctive villain of Fleming’s best-selling novel.

Frayling’s point was that the late Cubby Broccoli had great instincts and knew a winner when he saw one, and the villains of the James Bond books (and subsequent movies) were an integral ingredient of the general appeal of the world of James Bond: we all love a good villain, and the EON films certainly gave us plenty of very memorable ones!

As Frayling also noted, Ian Fleming himself also had his finger on the common pulse back in the 1950s when his books first appeared: his 007 thrillers were a mix of kiss kiss bang bang, combined with larger-than-life villains. In developing his memorable baddies, the Bond creator had also learnt from Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes; Doyle’s Professor Moriarty (the ‘Napoleon of crime’) had entered popular culture as a suitably charismatic adversary for Sherlock Holmes, and Fleming’s villains (such as Le Chiffre, Mr. Big, Hugo Drax, Auric Goldfinger, and – most notably – Ernst Stavro Blofeld) all gained a similar status and public popularity. The films pushed this to new levels, adding embellishments to our favourite villains.

While we all root for our hero 007, there’s also a percentage of us that look forward to discovering the latest villain’s devious schemes and secretly relish how this forms a core part of the latest screen adventure. One of the delicious pleasures of the Bond films is finding out how 007 will try and stop the villain’s grand designs: can Bond sabotage the scheme in some way, or subvert the plan at the last moment, even with the clock ticking down the minutes and even seconds? Dismantle an atomic bomb, Mr. Bond? ‘No problem. All in a day’s work’. In addition, it is also about how the villain, who is invariably ‘proud’ of his or her grand plan, is often tempted to ‘explain’ to James Bond the details of his latest dastardly scheme.

Moreover, according to Frayling, many of the Bond films and their powerful villains have reflected the general anxieties of the times in which they were made: Dr. No coincided with early fears about the atomic age; similarly, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Blofeld tried to use germ warfare to infect livestock; in The Man With The Golden Gun, Scaramanga operated within the context of a world energy crisis; in Licence to Kill, Franz Sanchez exemplified anxieties about the rise of powerful drug barons; and in The World Is Not Enough, the devious Elektra King sought to control and manipulate vital oil supplies.

In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the plots of the 007 films in relation to Bond’s villains have often anticipated or reflected dangerous geopolitical trends in the world: in Tomorrow Never Dies, Elliot Carver, the global media magnate, was out to radically expand his media empire and control events using ‘fake’ news, and, in Skyfall, Raoul Silva employed hacking and cyber-terrorism to disrupt vital organizational systems, while in No Time To Die, the main theme concerned nanobot bioweapons – all key anxieties in the 21st century.

Live and Let Live

As Frayling argued, the Bond formula has proved ‘extraordinarily resilient’ over time, surviving self-parody and different Bond actors to become by far the most successful franchise in movie history. Christoph Waltz, who played Franz Oberhauser (AKA Blofeld) – the main villain in SPECTRE and ‘subsidiary’ villain in No Time To Die – created yet another highly memorable entry in the history of Bond film villainy, as he is a demented individual who clearly enjoys engaging in some cruel psychological ‘jousting’ with Bond.

Indeed, a number of the actors who have been selected to play Bond villains have relished the chance, as Bond’s baddies provide golden opportunities for a star to really get their teeth into portraying the ‘dark side’ of human nature. Steven Berkoff, the mesmerising actor and playwright who was given the role of the Russian General Orlov in Octopussy, when he was interviewed by Emily Maitlis in 2010, said that he found it ‘flattering’ to play evil characters, and he claimed that the best actors assumed villainous roles. Similarly, in 2016, he said: ‘Sometimes the best roles are villainous’. Writing his own blog for the Oldie magazine in 2020, Berkoff explained: ‘The most important thing about playing a villain is that you must appear to be highly intelligent and even devilishly attractive. The public must want to identify with you’.

Some of the Bond actors certainly acknowledged his point. As the late and great Sir Roger Moore commented (rather mischievously) in his book Bond on Bond (2012): ‘In truth, I always wanted to play a Bond villain as they invariably have the best dialogue – describing their complex, evil and very sinister schemes to do away with Jimmy Bond…’.

In fact, the ‘jousting’ between Bond and the villain is, arguably, very much at the core of the 007 adventures, and it is something that Ian Fleming emphasised in the original novels. Fleming also took an evident delight in describing his villains and their main physical features, together with their key flaws and foibles. The Bond author recognised that we all love to hate a baddie, and it is something that the film franchise has never lost sight of, much to the delight of generations of James Bond aficionados. And long may that continue under Amazon’s new stewardship of the character.

Did You Know?

Bond creator Ian Fleming originally had Christopher Lee in mind for the role of Dr. Julius No, and the pair discussed the idea while they played golf together. Joseph Wiseman, of course, was selected for the role. Lee, however, won some consolation later on in his career when he was given the opportunity to play the villainous assassin Francisco Scaramanga.