Britain is obsessed with who will be the next James Bond, yet he is seemingly nowhere to be found. Earlier this year, between holidays with his pop-star girlfriend Dua Lipa, Callum Turner was supposedly anointed as 007, but those claims should be taken with a pinch of gunpowder after previous reports claimed that Aaron Taylor-Johnson was a dead cert.
Meanwhile, others clamour for Jacob Elordi, and just this week, Barry Keoghan ruled himself out of the running. The other day, Saturday Night Live UK dropped a promo featuring host Jamie Dornan and cast member Al Nash comparing their Bond chances, before Gugu Mbatha-Raw told The Independent it’s time for a female 007. Soon, census workers will go door to door asking every young person in the country to audition. After that, the draft.
Thankfully, Riz Ahmed isn’t hanging around waiting to be asked. Instead, the 43-year-old Four Lions star has constructed a vehicle for himself with more tricks than even a fully equipped Aston Martin DB5.
In the new Prime Video series Bait, which Ahmed wrote and stars in, he plays Shah Latif, a struggling British Asian actor whose life is upended after he intentionally lets a paparazzo get a shot of him leaving his audition to play Britain’s least secretive spy. At first, Bait plays out more like a screwball comedy than a spy thriller. Everyone, including Latif’s family, is baffled when the story breaks. His dad, wonderfully, enquires: “Did Craig Daniel die?”
As Bait progresses, it becomes clear that Bond, as the title implies, is simply the hook in this story. In truth, Ahmed has crafted a many-layered and deeply personal tale about multiculturalism, machismo, and the weight of family expectations.
In real life, Ahmed is no struggling actor. He made history in 2021 when he became the first Muslim and the first British Pakistani actor to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor, for his performance in Sound of Metal, and he won an Oscar for his short film The Long Goodbye the following year.
Still, he and his character have plenty in common. Both have a past in outspoken activist rap music, and evidently, both have struggled to reconcile their public and private lives. Ahmed recently revealed that Bait was partly inspired by his experience of starring in the big-budget Spider-Man spin-off Venom and then shortly afterwards being banned from his local Tesco after being suspected of shoplifting.
That anecdote, along with the racism inherent in it, is magnified in Bait. When the idea of Latif playing Bond makes national news, the online response is predictably toxic, and events take an even darker, scarier turn when his family have a severed pig’s head thrown through their front window.
The show goes on to explore the subtle challenges that arise when someone is forced to act as a representative for a wider culture. In one key scene, Latif suspects he is being pushed towards the Bond role by MI5, who want to use him as a puppet spokesperson to his own community. “I thought I’d be representing us to them,” frets Latif. “Not them to us.”
While exploring these deeper themes, Ahmed still manages to mine plenty of laughs from the juxtaposition of Latif’s apparent success and his disintegrating personal life. He’s aided in this by Man Like Mobeen star Guz Khan, who turns in a scene-stealing performance as Latif’s cousin, Zulfi. The pair were raised together, and their banter captures the ambivalence of a sibling relationship perfectly. “Cuz, look at me, I’m proud of you...” says Zulfi when he hears the Bond rumour, immediately adding: “Do they know about your height? Are they going to give you special shoes? James Bond’s big, innit?”
There’s also an inspired piece of casting in Patrick Stewart, who lends his voice to play a deftly surreal supporting role, and a cameo from Yesterday star Himesh Patel as Latif’s more successful rival Raj Thakkar.
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Even though it turns out that Bait is about much more than just Bond, it’s still promising to see that Amazon allowed the show to reference the actual character, and the real-life hoopla that exists around his casting, rather than forcing Ahmed to come up with a knock-off spy character who wouldn’t carry the same cultural weight.
Because, of course, there’s nothing quite like the Bond role and the weight of expectation that surrounds it. Even Daniel Craig, who went on to star in five films over a 15-year period, was initially seen as all wrong for the part. When he was hired in 2005, he was still best known as Geordie from Our Friends in the North, and the tabloids quickly decided he was too rugged, too moody and too blond to be Bond. The Daily Mirror ran the front-page headline: “The Name’s Bland – James Bland.”
Craig has worked hard to build his career outside the franchise, and in the Knives Out detective Benoit Blanc he successfully found a very different sort of hero to inhabit. After shooting Spectre in 2015, he famously said he’d “rather slash my wrists” than make another Bond, although he did later recant before making 2021’s No Time to Die. For young actors who covet the role as Britain’s signature hero, there must also be a wariness about taking on a character of whom audiences feel such intense ownership.
Much has been written about what Amazon will do with Bond after it bought the creative rights to the franchise for $20m (£15m) last year, following the vast corporation’s earlier acquisition of MGM for $8.5bn. Bait, certainly, has a lot more going for it than the widely panned reality game show 007: Road to a Million that it churned out in 2023.
Five years on from Craig’s final outing in No Time to Die, the next 007 film has Dune’s Denis Villeneuve as its director and Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight hard at work on a script, but we’re still no closer to finding out the identity of the next James Bond.
With Bait, Ahmed proves that landing the part shouldn’t be the pinnacle of any actor’s ambition. There are so many more interesting stories still to tell.
‘Bait’ is streaming on Prime Video now
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