Timothy Dalton reflects on his experience as James Bond

AV Club scored a long interview with former James Bond actor Timothy Dalton to cover his career so far. Primarily to promote his new series "Penny Dreadful", the interview covered a number of his other films, some rather obscure, and of course his two outings as 007. Click here for the complete interview.

AVC: The story from several sources has been that you were actually pitched the role of James Bond many years before you eventually accepted it.

TD: I was. After Sean Connery left.

AVC: And you just didn�t feel you were up to it?

TD: Oh, it just seemed like a ridiculous notion! I mean, I was very flattered that someone should even think that I should, but I don�t know, I was in my early 20s, I think, and� hey, look, on an intelligent level, it just seemed idiotic to take over from Sean Connery. I mean, if I was perfect for it, if I thought I�d be brilliant in it, if I�d loved the idea of taking over, I would�ve still said �no.� It is idiotic to take over from Sean Connery at the time when those movies were� I can remember as a kid going to see them. Not a child, but I was a teenager. I mean, you can�t take over for Sean Connery in that series at its height! After Dr. No, after From Russia With Love, after Goldfinger� I don�t know how many more he did, but to me, those were always the three great ones. You don�t take over. So of course I said no.

So now the corollary of that statement is to ask, �Then why did you say yes later?� [Laughs.] Well, because it was later, you know? There�d been Connery, there�d been [George] Lazenby, there�d been Roger Moore. I think now everybody was now used to the idea that this series was gonna last. No one was trying to cheaply exploit the success, which is a path that�s doomed to failure. This was a series where the producers were honestly trying to make each one better than the one before, a series that the producers took pride in and wanted to maintain. And interestingly enough, I�m sure that�s because it was still controlled by a family, the Broccolis. And [Harry] Saltzman with him in the first place, but then Saltzman went. If it would�ve been a studio, it might�ve been an entirely different trajectory for the film series, but because it was Mr. Broccoli and his family� You know, it was their life. They took pride in it and were trying to make good. So that�s a plus. And now that three people had already played it and I was lots older�I must�ve been 10, 12, 15 years older�I thought it was worth a shot. [Laughs.]

AVC: When you came in, you did so with a profound desire to hew as close to the original Ian Fleming version of the character as possible.

TD: Well, I came in under certain circumstances. The prevailing wisdom at the time�which I would say I shared�was that the series, whilst very entertaining, had become rather spoof-like. It was one-liners and raised eyebrows and it had become, let�s say, too lighthearted. And the producer, Mr. Broccoli, felt that, and he wanted to try and bring it back to something more like its original roots with those Sean Connery films. I had loved them all, and I had loved the books. But I think ultimately for anything to be successful, an audience must empathize. They must also get involved, but they must be given enough to suspend disbelief so that they�re truly able to become involved with the story. That�s not to say that there can�t be any comedy. There should always be comedy. Comedy is a great thing.

So that was the loose framework that we sort of embarked on, but then you find that nobody else wants to change it all! [Laughs.] The studio doesn�t want to change it, the people that work on it don�t want to change it� Everyone�s happy with what they know. And everyone intellectually says, �Well, yes, we should, it was getting a bit stale, it was getting a bit this, that, and the other,� but nobody actually wants to. So it wasn�t as easy as one would hope. I mean, now they have. I think now, with Daniel [Craig], they have. But that was, what, almost 20 years later that they actually embarked on something more believable?

AVC: So how do you look back on The Living Daylights and License To Kill, then?

TD: Well, it�s� it�s strange, and I should be careful what I say, because, of course, everyone is interested in Bond. It�s almost like a bracket or a bubble in one�s life. Everybody treats the idea of a Bond film different to anything else. I mean, journalists come knowing the story they want to write, whereas on a normal piece of work we�re all discovering what to write about. We�re discovering what we�re acting. It�s part of the creative process. But in a Bond movie? No. People know what they want to write about. And they know, really, what they want. Everyone�s got an opinion, from the top of the studio down to the guy in the street. But you�re sort of� outside.

No one, no matter how well someone can communicate, can tell you�and I certainly can�t really communicate accurately�what it is like to be the actor playing James Bond. The only actors who can are the other actors who�ve played the part. It�s kind of astonishing, really. You are in kind of a bubble. It�s real, it�s valuable, it�s exciting, and it can give great pleasure. And yet it�s somehow unreal. No, forget the �unreal� bit. But it�s somehow outside the normal course of what we all share in.

AVC: But what an experience.

TD: What an experience, indeed. A fantastic experience.

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