HOW often in your adolescent youth have you looked at James Bond and just thought, “Man, I wanna be that guy!”?
Plenty of us surely still think that now, be it Daniel Craig’s smouldering characterisation of the spy or Sean Connery’s dapper personification of 007.
But along with the tuxedos, the Aston Martins, and the smoking hot Bond girls, every James Bond has the yin to his yang: the crafty villain bent on destroying him, MI6, and sometimes the world.
Recently, it’s been announced that one of our breakout actors to watch this year, Rami Malek, has been cast as the antihero of Daniel Craig’s final performance in the role. While we don’t know many details about Bond 25 yet – the movie isn’t titled , and it’s only coming out in April 2020 – we can look back at all the Bond villains of old and reminisce about all the masterminds that have attempted (and mostly failed) to bring Bond to his knees.
If you want to emulate the debonair swagger of the one Mr James Bond, who will your villain be?
Le Chiffre
Alongside Daniel Craig’s debut performance as James Bond in Casino Royale was Mads Mikkelsen and his brilliant enactment of Le Chiffre. In the movie, Bond goes against Le Chiffre in a high-stakes poker game to recuperate his losses from a failed attempt at blowing up a prototype plane.
But of course, that’s the least of what Le Chiffre is capable of. That scene of him torturing Bond and his jewels? Seared in our minds forever. There’s no forgetting the screaming, honestly.
Dr. Julius No
More than 60 years ago, a little doctor going by the name of Julius No waltzed onto our screens on the eponymous movie, Dr. No. The suave scientist, operating in Jamaica, is your quintessential stereotypical villain with a bauxite mine lair, flame throwers, a beautiful home, and a plan to sabotage the United States’ spaceflight program.
Francisco Scaramanga
You might have known him from Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars prequels, and as Count Dracula, but did you also know that Christopher Lee played sharpshooting hitman Francisco Scaramanga? Well, if you had watched The Man with the Golden Gun, you would have known that.
Charging one million dollars per kill, Scaramanga wields his signature golden gun to carry out his assassinations. James Bond, in fact, was the only man Scaramanga considered his equal. Can our favourite British spy then charge a million dollars per hit, too? You know, just in case things go south with MI6.
Goldfinger
One of the most instantly-recognisable villains is Auric Goldfinger. His penchant for gold (and the smuggling of it) led to Bond thinking that he was set to steal a bunch of gold. However, Goldfinger’s ultimate plan was to set off an atomic bomb in Fort Knox holding most of the United State’s gold reserves. With all that gold gone, Goldfinger would retain autonomy over the gold trade. Kinda genius, but then again, to be expected; we’re watching a James Bond movie here.
Raoul Silva
Is there anything scarier than a villain with resentment towards the organisation you work for? That’s what Bond and M (RIP) had to face in the 2012 film Skyfall, with Javier Bardem’s perfect antagonist Raoul Silva playing a cyber-terrorist that was formerly the spy for M, before she traded him for six prisoners. Ouch.
Max Zorin
Oh, you know, let’s just inject these poor pregnant ladies with a bunch of steroids to engineer a “super soldier”. After all, if Captain America could result from a program like that, we should be fine, right? Clearly, the Nazis were wrong, instead accidentally creating the psychopathic Max Zorin (played by Christopher Walken) who planned to destroy the Silicon Valley by triggering an earthquake along the San Andreas faultline.
Ernst Stavro Blodfeld
If there’s one super villain of the Bond universe, it is Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Having made an appearance in eight of the Bond films, it’s safe to say Blofeld is the quintessential nemesis to Bond, with him being the head of the malicious organisation S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Whether he’s attempting to ignite a war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, conducting some biological warfare diabolism, or just straight up torturing Bond, it’s safe to say that there’s no more nefarious villain in the Bond universe than Blofeld.
