By Rami Malek has been announced for Bond 25, and it sounds like he'll play the villain. We've been expecting him. Given the amount of whispers to that effect over the last few months, it doesn't come as a huge surprise to Bond fans, but it does come with a bristle of excitement.
Malek's villainy wasn't confirmed in so many words, but watch Malek's interview from the webcast - "I promise you all I will be making sure Mr Bond does not get an easy ride of this" - and it's fairly obvious.
It's an interesting choice. Malek's never gone full evil before. He's been charming and operatic in Bohemian Rhapsody. He's been slippery and underhand in the remake of Papillon. He's been internally knotted and tense in Mr Robot. But now he's got the chance to bring all of those elements, which have been there throughout his career and are essential for any Bond villain worth his piranha tank, together and really go for it.
They've been the essential elements of a latter-day Bond villain since at least GoldenEye, though the proportions in which each actor taking up the mantle decides to mix them vary. Christoph Waltz's Blofeld and Jonathan Pryce's Elliot Carver dialled up the unsettling charm and smarm, while Robert Carlyle's Renard Zokas played up the internal wrangling and Begbie-esque flair for violence. To be fair, he did have a bullet slowly worming its way through his brain, which would likely make you a bit glum, too.
But one thing has generally been set in stone: you need to have gone full baddy. Any prospective Bond villain needed to have done an unfettered evildoer at least once in their career to really stand a chance of convincing producers that you were worth a punt. Think of Javier Bardem, then best known for his bolt-gunning in No Country For Old Men, or 10-time Dracula and five-time Fu Manchu Christopher Lee, who was about as close to the embodiment of pure evil on film as it's possible to get.
So Malek's introduction is a very interesting move. As a bloke, he's got a pure-hearted vibe. He seems like a positive kind of guy to be around. You'd go for sushi with him. He'd insist on paying. Bringing that sensibility, and that slightly glassy-eyed, youthful look, to an archetype that has liked its incumbents to be bombastically nasty or, at the very least, facially disfigured, shifts the whole thing into new ground at a time when the franchise is beginning to look towards a new and possibly rebooted post-Craig future.
Daniel Craig's been reliably excellent as Bond, but his adversaries haven't always quite measured up. Malek's casting gives Bond 25 every chance of giving Craig the high he deserves to go out on, and Malek the chance to turn himself from insurgent (and deserved) Oscar winner to a member of the established top-table acting elite. He's the obvious choice, and he's the right choice.
