Sir Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens)

Character

Stephens said about his new role. "I knew I would never get to play James Bond, so playing the villain was very much second best, but great for me."

Gustav Graves, the film's Richard Branson-esque villain, is to be modelled on the famous British entrepreneur. Director Lee Tamahori said in a recent interview that the film needed "a very effervescent & buoyant character."

He added, "Usually the chief villains are the same age as Bond, or older. But we decided to peg this villain as a much younger guy". Graves is an energetic and extreme sportsman, rather like the British speed hero Donald Campbell, who pushed himself to the edge. "When he and Bond go at each other in this movie, they do it with great physical gusto because that's what the roles entail".

Graves is an orphan who worked in Argentinean diamond mines in his youth, which lead him to his pursuit and dominance of the diamond trade. Graves owns a lucrative diamond mine in Iceland.

He is a keen ecologist, champion fencer, and developer of the Icarus space programme.

"People really need stories of good versus evil where good triumphs. That is archetypal, and humanity requires that, and this gives humanity that. They also want to see somebody they would love to be, getting out of the most ridiculous situations, and James Bond does that. He’s the guy who always gets away. Somehow manages to turn things around and how is he going to do that, how is he going to get out of this situation. It’s like the old style cliff-hangers it fulfils all of those things and people always want to see that."

Graves resides in his palace in Iceland, where Bond, Jinx and Miranda Frost all attend a party. The party is to celebrate Graves' new status after he is knighted by the Queen early in the film for his world-wide command for mining diamonds. The mining is also linked to the main device of the film, a space based super weapon. Left: The "Graves Diamonds" logo

Jinx, an NSA agent, is sent by her superior (Damian Falco) to investigate Graves. Miranda Frost has gained Graves` trust as his fencing instructor but is secretly spying in her capacity as an MI6 agent. Bond however, is on a personal mission to discover who betrayed his cover in the Korean pretitles sequence.

After a bedroom rendezvous between Bond and Frost, and a fight between the facially mutated Zao and 007, the ice palace is melted by Graves` space super weapon ("a second sun" - rumoured to be called Icarus).

The action continues with Bond escaping the melting ice palace in the Aston Martin Vanquish, with Zao hot on his trail in a Jaguar XKR.

Biography

Born: 21st April 1969, Middlesex London England

The son of Dame Maggie Smith and the late Sir Robert Stephens, Toby Stephens was to the theatrical manor born. An accomplished actor in his own right, Stephens, who bears a distinct resemblance to his mother, was born in April of 1969. After his parents' divorce when he was four years old, Stephens and his brother (actor Chris Larkin) grew up ravelling back and forth across the Atlantic with their mother for her numerous acting engagements.

After training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Stephens began his professional career as a stagehand at the Chichester Theatre Festival. He had his film debut with a bit part in Sally Potter's 1992 adaptation of Orlando, but it was on the stage that he first made a name for himself. At the age of 25, Stephens won a Sir John Gielgud Best Actor Award and an Ian Charleson Award for his title role in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1994 production of Coriolanus. He went on to perform in a number of plays with the RSC, including Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Antony and Cleopatra.

In 1996, Stephens attracted the attention of an international film audience with his role as the melancholy Duke Orsino in Trevor Nunn's lush adaptation of Twelfth Night. That same year, he starred alongside Rupert Graves and Tara Fitzgerald in the acclaimed television adaptation of Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, further earning a reputation as a man who could actually make frock coats look sexy. More period attire followed in 1997, when Stephens starred as a jaded, grieving photographer who captures a supernatural phenomenon with his camera in Photographing Fairies. That same year, he could again be seen doffing a frock coat for his role in Cousin Bette. The film featured him as Jessica Lange's nephew; coincidentally, he had played Stanley Kowalski to her Blanche DuBois a year earlier in Peter Hall's London production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

In 1999, Stephens again stepped back a few eras - this time to the opulent St. Petersburg of the Empire Period - to play Vladimir Lensky, hot-blooded best friend of Ralph Fiennes' Evgeny Onegin in Martha Fiennes' adaptation of Onegin. In addition to his screen work, he continued to perform on the stage, winning particular acclaim for his work opposite Diana Rigg in both Phedre and Britannicus in London and New York.