BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS: BIT PARTS IN THE BOND FRANCHISE

It’s been five years since Daniel Craig’s Bond shuffled off this mortal coil, and with him a lot of certainty about the franchise’s trajectory. After sixty years and twenty-five films, EON pulled off not one but two unprecedented maneuvers: they killed off the hero of their blockbuster franchise, and they sold off the creative control for all things Bond to Amazon MGM Studios, placing the future of the series in the hands of a genuine Bond Villain. But death is not an end, only a change, and as the final credits for No Time to Die reminded us, James Bond will return.

And return he shall, as Amazon has already begun moving and shaking to get Bond 26 into production, having tapped Denis Villeneuve, the architect of Dune, to direct. While that’s being prepped, IO Interactive’s very excellent 007 First Light was recently released to critical acclaim, satiating fans who crave more adventures with Ian Fleming’s spy. And streaming services are following suit, with the likes of the Criterion Channel making earlier films as Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger available for subscribers. It’s an exciting time to be a fan, with plenty to tide us over until we get the next Bond.

But who should be the next Bond? Preferably, it should not be someone already associated with another major cinematic franchise. This should rule out your Henry Cavills, your Benedict Cumberbatches, and your Aaron Taylor-Johnsons. It should also probably not be someone who already feels like they’ve aged out of the role; as incredible as Idris Elba or Dan Stevens would be, their ships may have unfortunately sailed. The ideal candidate should be an established actor, striking the right balance between household name and complete unknown. In this writer’s opinion? Jack Lowden, who is currently killing it on Slow Horses, but has also appeared in films as Dunkirk and Benediction. He even managed to play Morrissey without embarrassing himself. Lowden is young, handsome, and Scottish; check him out, if you’re unfamiliar with his work.

Speaking of complete unknowns, the Bond is a franchise that is absolutely chalk full of them. Ever since pre-Hawaii Five-0 Jack Lord donned a pair of effeminate sunglasses in Dr. No, the series has been flooded with bit parts showcasing future talents, offering small roles and glorified extra work to actors who would later become famous in their own right. To continue the ongoing celebration of Bond, we’re taking a look back at some of the more prominent familiar faces that have popped up in the franchise, dating all the back to the Connery era. This is by no means a comprehensive list, just a collection of some of the more notable examples the franchise has gifted the world. Read on to see who you may have missed.

Garry Marshall in Goldfinger

He may have created Happy Days and spent the twilight of his career helming a slew of holiday-themed romantic comedies starring ensemble casts, but Garry Marshall had to get his start somewhere, and as luck would have it he appeared in Goldfinger, the quintessential Bond Film. Late in the film, eponymous villain Auric Goldfinger (the great Gert Fröbe) reveals his plan to knock of Fort Knox’s gold supply to members of the American Mafia, who have all chipped in a considerable amount to his operation. Among them is a baby-faced Marshall, who is admittedly not easy to spot: sporting a tan suit, he spends the majority of his screentime lurking in the background, and is never once utters a line of dialogue. But he is there, living proof that dreams do come true.

Joanna Lumley in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

George Lazenby’s sole outing as 007 is arguably the franchise’s zenith. It’s a film of magnificent quality, an exhilarating, sumptuously made and emotionally complex entry that proved Bond could survive something as potentially disastrous as recasting its lead actor. While time has only been kind to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the plot is admittedly slightly bizarro, in that it involves Head of SPECTRE and Number One Nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (played here by Telly Savalas) hypnotizing and weaponizing a dozen “Angels of Death” to devastate the world through microbacterial warfare. The most prominently featured of these women is Ruby (Angela Scoular), the curly-haired dead ringer for Meg Ryan, but also in the mix is Joanna Lumley, making one of her first film appearances as another of Blofeld’s brainwashed Angels. Lumley does not have much to do–her big close-up involves her gawking Bond, posing undercover as kilted genealogist Sir Hilary Bray–but it did mark the beginning of a successful career, which includes a starring role in The New Avengers, a revival of the 1960s series that starred Secret Service’s very own Diana Rigg, and her iconic, BAFTA-winning work in Absolutely Fabulous, alongside creator/co-star Jennifer Saunders.

Sid Haig in Diamonds Are Forever

Bond’s globetrotting excursions seldom took him stateside, but for Connery’s final official outing with EON, he spends the majority of Diamonds Are Forever’s runtime traversing gaudy 1970s Las Vegas. Welcoming him into the country are the henchman of Morton Slumber, a shady mortician whose business is a front for an intricate diamond-smuggling ring. One of his employees is played by the late, great Sid Haig, decades before he became a horror icon as the patriarch in Rob Zombie’s Devil’s Rejects trilogy. In Diamonds, Haig has the good fortune of sharing all of his scenes with a sleepwalking Connery, even scoring a laugh by playing up his affectionately dim-witted character with his line delivery of “I got a brudder!” His other big moment arrives when he helps chuck poor Lana Wood out of a hotel window, where her fall is thankfully broken by a well-placed swimming pool.

Yuen Qiu in The Man with the Golden Gun 

Right around the time Roger Moore took the franchise reins, the Bond’s primary course of action was to emulate the popular genre trends of the time. Live and Let Die took on Blaxploitation movies, Moonraker tackled Star Wars, and The Man with the Golden Gun was clearly chasing the exponential boom of martial arts flicks, namely ones starring Bruce Lee. While on the hunt for the deadly Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) and his powerful weapon, Bond films himself captured and held prisoner at a Kung Fu school in Bangkok. Luckily, he’s rescued by local ally Lieutenant Hip (Soon-Taik Oh) and his pair of nieces, one of whom played by Yuen Qiu, who would gain international fame as the Landlady in Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle thirty years later. If you ever wanted to see her kick some more ass, look no further.

Charles Dance in For Your Eyes Only

Following the rampant excess of Moonraker, Bond needed some serious course correction, and the result was For Your Eyes Only, a conscious effort to ground the series with a more sobering entry. Essentially Moore’s take on From Russia with Love, which likewise includes a much sought-after codebreaking device, his fifth film included some of the darkest moments of his tenure, particularly when it came to confronting the villains. The most memorable of the bunch is Warren Zevon-lookalike Emile Leopold Locque (Michael Gothard, who played Father Barre in Ken Russell’s The Devils), who is often accompanied by Claus, played by Charles Dance. For Your Eyes Only may have been Dance’s first film role, but he still manages to make a deadly impression, sporting a cold stare that is unmistakably that of Tywin Lannister’s. For some bonus trivia: Claus’s single most horrible deed in the film is the murder of Lisl, The Countess von Schlaf, who was played by Cassandra Harris and married to Pierce Brosnan at the time. Though he wouldn’t become Bond for fourteen years, Brosnan’s brief visit to the set was enough for Cubby Broccoli to keep him in the back of his mind as a potential candidate.

Rowan Atkinson in Never Say Never Again

Does this one count? Not just the role, but the film itself: due to some complicated copyright issues dating back to the publication of Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, a producer named Kevin McClory was able to retain the cinematic rights to all things Blofeld and SPECTRE, becoming a perpetual thorn in EON’s side that would not be resolved until 2015’s Spectre. And to add insult to injury, McClory produced his own film where he cast Connery as Bond, twelve years after the actor had seemingly hung up the dinner jacket for good, making 1983 an unofficial Battle of the Bonds between Never Say Never Again and Roger Moore’s Octopussy. (It’s important to note that Connery and Moore were good friends in real life, and shared no animosity towards each other). Never Say Never Again was a remake of Thunderball with a lot less swimming, but it did include a part for Mr. Bean himself, featuring Rowan Atkinson in his feature film debut. As the exceedingly bumbling foreign correspondent Nigel Small-Fawcett, Atkinson has one of the more prominent roles on this list, one worth noting because it does feel like a dry run for his own lampooning of Bond in the Johnny English trilogy.

Dolph Lundgren in A View to a Kill

For generally being one of the more oft-maligned Bond films, Moore’s swan song as 007 sure has a lot going for it: a killer theme song by Duran Duran, Christopher Walken and Grace Jones as a gloriously unhinged pair of villains, and Dolph Lundgren in his very first film appearance. Six months before he would kill Apollo Creed as Rocky IV’s fearsome Ivan Drago, Lundgren scored a small part as KGB muscle Venz, showing up to accompany General Gogol (Walter Gotell) for a meeting with Walken’s Max Zorin. Lundgren has no lines, and all that’s really asked of him is to look imposing in the background and marvel at the impressive strength of Jones–his then-girlfriend at the time–as she lifts a hapless dude and holds him up over her head.

As another bonus for A View to a Kill: franchise stalwart Maud Adams, who appeared as a Bond Lady in The Man with the Golden Gun and starred as the eponymous Octopussy, makes her third appearance as an extra at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Peep her in the background, walking in between the shoulders of David Yip and Roger Moore as they chat in the foreground.

Gerard Butler in Tomorrow Never Dies 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Pierce Brosnan era needed new threats to turn to, and so his sophomore entry confronted the dangerous power of the media. The villain of Tomorrow Never Dies is the Rupert Murdoch-esque mogul Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), who has a propensity for surreptitiously committing atrocities and being the first to report them so his news network can enjoy the number one spot in the world. One such misdeed occurs early on, where his team operates a remote-controlled sea vac drill to sink the HMS Devonshire, dooming the entire crew on board. One of these crew members is Gerard Butler, a decade before he became a bona fide action star in his own right. Credited as “Leading Seaman,” Butler only has one line (“We’re now down fourteen degrees by the stern!”) and his face is barely discernible amidst the chaos, but the urgency in his performance does a fine job of underlining the hopelessness of the situation.

Hugh Bonneville in Tomorrow Never Dies

But wait, there’s more: future Downton Abbey and Paddington star Hugh Bonneville also appears later on in the film, playing the role of Air Warfare Officer on board the HMS Bedford, a Royal Navy ship that accompanies Bond on his siege of Carver’s stealth ship.

Richard Branson in Casino Royale

Alright, this is not a bit part from a non-famous person, but Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, has a cameo in Casino Royale, spotted during the sequence where Craig’s Bond is chasing a terrorist through the Miami airport. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss him moment, but he’s in there, going through security like some member of the general public. Considering he owns an airline in real life, it’s a very credible performance on Mr. Branson’s part.

And there you have it. Are there any other examples we missed? Any future stars yet to come? Let us know what you think in the comments below.