Denis Villeneuve told GQ’s Zach Baron that the next James Bond is “in the process,” and added, “I am pushing the gas,” during a screening and conversation at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles on Tuesday. That matters because the 26th Bond film still has no lead, seventeen months after Amazon MGM gave Villeneuve the job.
Baron tried the shortcut anyway, asking him to blink once for Robert Pattinson and twice for Callum Turner. Villeneuve did not blink. (A decade of keeping Dune’s secrets, it turns out, transfers nicely to keeping Amazon’s.)
He was blunter about the stakes than the casting. “We cannot fuck it up. We do not have the choice,” he said, describing himself as carrying “the target of the sniper” on his chest. That is the job Amazon MGM named him to in June 2025, three months after its joint venture with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson closed and handed the studio creative control of 007 for the first time in the franchise’s history.
What is confirmed stops there. What gets reported keeps going. Deadline reported on Nov. 6 that Pattinson and Nicholas Hoult joined Jack Lowden, Josh O’Connor and Callum Turner in recent screen tests, with a fifth actor added at the eleventh hour whose name has not surfaced. Deadline’s Justin Kroll teased the late additions hours before that story posted:
https://x.com/krolljvar/status/2118857926517698844
Variety has reported separately that Harry Styles has had discussions about the part and that Theo James has not been ruled out. Amazon declined to comment on all of it. Every name in this paragraph is a report, not a cast list.
The machinery behind the secrecy is further along than the no-comment suggests. Casting director Nina Gold signed on in March, first-round auditions ran in August, test offers went out in September, and the final tests slipped from early October to the end of the month to fit the finalists’ schedules. Producer Amy Pascal told Deadline the end of the year is “a good bet” for an announcement, calling the process “really, really methodical.”
By the numbers:
- Dune: Part Two grossed $715.2 million worldwide on a $190 million budget.
- No Time to Die grossed $758.9 million worldwide on a $250 million budget, and has sat dark since its Oct. 8, 2021 domestic opening.
- Licence to Kill (1989) to GoldenEye (1995) is still the franchise’s longest gap between films, at roughly six years.
- A 2027 shoot and 2028 release, the window the BBC has reported, would beat that record by a year.
Hours before taking the GQ stage, Villeneuve signed off on the IMAX 70mm print of Dune: Part Three, closing out post-production on a film that opens Dec. 18 and a decade of his work on Arrakis.
What this probably means: the casting announcement is a signature on a contract, not the result of a screen test, and it likely lands inside the next few weeks, timed to ride alongside Dune’s own press cycle rather than compete with it. (Hollywood’s chairs keep turning over this fall, from the Bond search down to this week’s co-CEO swap at DC Studios, where Marvel’s James Gunn and Peter Safran gave way to new leadership; nobody in this business seems to hold a job for long.) After that comes a shoot that eats most of 2027 and a marketing campaign that has to sell a brand-new face to an audience that last bought a ticket for Daniel Craig.
Villeneuve has already rehearsed the bit about not saying it. At the LACMA Art+Film Gala days before the GQ event, he told the room: “To express my gratitude with the blessing of my new friends at Amazon, I will reveal to you tonight who will be the next James Bond. The new James Bond is … and I will stop right now because Amy Pascal is about to have a heart attack.”
He signed off on one print this week. Deadline’s sources expect the next signature, the one with a name on it, before Thanksgiving.
