UPDATE: The “Aaron Taylor Johnson being offered the James Bond role” rumor is untrue. This comes straight from 007 producer Barbara Broccoli. E! is saying the same thing.
Earlier: The 33-year-old Aaron Taylor Johnson, a first-rate actor who’s been floundering around in mostly crap-level films for a good 15 years, is apparently the new James Bond.
The talk is strictly “rumored” and unofficial as we speak, but 007, who was blown into bloody scraps and shards during the finale of No Time to Die, is definitely back and alive and ready to reinvigorate a big-budget action franchise that culturally mattered between the early to mid ’60s (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball) and has been mostly smirking at its own reflection or otherwise apologizing for itself ever since.
The fact that the long-ensconced Bond caretaker producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, have decided to hire another brawny white guy instead of going BIPOC with someone like Bridgerton‘s Rege-Jean Page…the apparent fact that Bond is still white tells us one thing clearly, and that’s that wokester terror and intimidation isn’t what it used to be. The radiant beauty of non-white males in whatever context is no longer accepted doctrine. The cultural page has turned and Joe and Jane Popcorn are sick of the all-white-guys=are-toxic bullshit.
Plus we all know that Daniel Craig‘s 007 was killed in No Time To Die as an apology gesture to wokester #MeToo Stalinists — a statement that said “we hear you…yes, Craig’s 007 has been a relatively mild-mannered, non-carniverous fellow with a disciplined libido, but that aside the 007 character has been a problematic chauvinist since the Connery era, and we agree that he needs to die now as a symbolic statement of empathy with and support for progressive women and the #MeToo movement.”
Alas, alpha men can’t be eliminated from film or film will die — it’s that simple. And Aaron Taylor Johnson does have big shoulders and sizable arm muscles.
You know who I liked better, the guy they should have picked? Jake Picking.
In my book Johnson has starred or costarred in exactly one grade-A film, which is when he played Count Vronsky in Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (’12). He was reasonably good as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy (’09), although the film itself is godawful in a girly way. He wasn’t bad in Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick-Ass (’10) and better than half-decent in Oliver Stone‘s Savages (’12).
But that was it. ATJ’s other films have been consistently painful or under-serving or negligible — Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Nocturnal Animals, The Wall, Outlaw King, Tenet (very small role), The King’s Man, Bullet Train (ghastly!) plus the forthcoming (and therefore no comment about) The Fall Guy, Kraven the Hunter and Nosferatu.