Even though we’re pretty much all caught up with the 007 movies here on James Bond Revisited, we figured we’d keep things going with a couple of James Bond TOP 10’s, and here’s our first list – THE TOP 10 JAMES BOND VILLAINS!
As a long-time obsessive of the series, my choices for the best Bond villains have shifted over the years, but this is the first time I’ve tried to make such a list after having dug so thoroughly into the movies here on James Bond Revisited. So, I wanted to make it a healthy balance of old and new villains, with a few off-kilter choices here and there. Some ground rules: James Bond henchmen and hench-women were included. I couldn’t make a villain list without having Richard Kiel’s Jaws, which paved the way for a few interesting additions I hope you’ll like. I also left out the baddies from Never Say Never Again as they aren’t canon, but I did give them a special shout-out at the end.
Coming in at number 10 is Le Chiffre, and of course, I’m talking about Mads Mikkelsen’s performance as Le Chiffre. As in point of fact, due to a complicated legal rights situation, Mikkelsen was not the first actor to play the part. Peter Lorre actually played him in a CBS Climax Theater TV version of the book, while Orson Welles played him in the big-budget spoof version of Casino Royale, which, strangely enough, is actually my most popular James Bond Revisited video ever.
Martin Campbell directed the performances of no less than three of my top 10 Bond villains, and I think what makes his villains so good is how grounded he keeps them while also making them a credible physical threat to Bond. Mikkelsen has a great look with the scar and the bleeding tear duct, but there’s a humanity to him in that he’s desperate. When Bond cleans him out at the tables, he knows he’s marked for death, and his desperate act against Bond—where he nearly destroys his testicles with a carpet beater—is one of the most cringe-inducing moments of the franchise.
And I have to mention—straight out of Ian Fleming—I don’t think any guy went to see Casino Royale and didn’t cross their legs in that sequence. It is nerve-racking.
Number nine is going to be a very controversial choice—Grace Jones’s May Day. Now, hear me out. She’s one of, I think, a recurring motif in this video—henchpeople that overshadow the main villain. Now, this may sound like sacrilege, as I know people love Christopher Walken as Max Zorin, but I never found that character to be all that interesting. He’s basically just an ’80s ripoff of Goldfinger, except instead of gold, you’ve got microchips. Yet May Day, as played by Grace Jones, was something different.
Now, Roger Moore always had this kind of jocular, buddy-buddy kind of relationship with everybody on set, you know, and it seemed like everybody really liked him. But one of the few people he didn’t get along with was Grace Jones. In fact, apparently, they despised each other offscreen. But that kind of leads to some intriguing energy between the two, especially when they have sex in a really uncomfortable moment.
Jones also strikes a really sympathetic note, especially towards the end when she’s been betrayed by Zorin and actually becomes kind of a good guy. And Moore is playing opposite her in the final act, doing something kind of different for Roger Moore—he’s acting. I love Roger Moore, but, you know, heavy lifting in terms of drama isn’t necessarily really his thing in the James Bond movies. He kind of plays it cool and easygoing. But, you know, at the end of A View to a Kill, he really has to evoke some sympathy, and it’s pretty interesting.
Also, she looks really cool. I mean, I love that hair, the outfits—it’s really neat.
Number eight—another henchman, but man, one of the best—Richard Kiel’s Jaws made for an unforgettable sight—seven foot two, with a mouth full of steel teeth. A lot of kids were probably afraid of him, but I wanted to be Jaws’s best friend. The fight between Bond and Kiel on the train in The Spy Who Loved Me is a classic, and everyone knew they had such a good thing going with Richard Kiel that they let him live.
Sadly, the impact of the character was ruined when he became essentially Wile E. Coyote to James Bond’s Road Runner in Moonraker, even becoming a good guy at the end with a dopey love interest to boot. They even let him talk. Actually, I have to say, Richard Kiel’s got a pretty good voice.
Coming in at number seven—Goldfinger. The one who started it all, Auric Goldfinger, played by Gert Fröbe, was an imposing sight with his German accent—which was actually dubbed because Fröbe’s German accent was too heavy for the role—and Humpty Dumpty look. Goldfinger was the first James Bond villain that was larger than life, right down to his obsession with gold.
Some of the dialogue here is unbelievable, and I always get a kick out of his death scene. Also, he had a really cool henchman of his own—Oddjob—but this is the one time the henchman didn’t overshadow the villain.
Number six—another henchperson, but man, a really hot one—Xenia Onatopp, as played by Famke Janssen. Wow. I mean, I don’t think nowadays you’d be able to do a PG-13 James Bond movie where the henchwoman orgasms when she kills people with her thighs. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. But Famke Janssen is so over the top and great in this role.
I mean, look at her—she’s absolutely gorgeous, and you can tell that Pierce Brosnan—or James Bond, I guess—really wants to, you know, have sex with her throughout most of the movie, even if she’s evil. Who can blame him? But it’s a really good part. I think that Janssen’s great in it. I can see why she was one of the few women to star in James Bond movies that actually kind of escaped the curse of the Bond girls, because she went on to have a really good career. Because the fact is, she’s actually a really, really solid actress. She’s terrific in this role, and some of the dialogue and acting is just terrific. I think Xenia Onatopp is just an absolute scene-stealer.
Coming in at number five—this is interesting because this is the first shadow James Bond character on my list—Red Grant, as played by Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love. Now, he’s a really physically imposing guy with his bleach-blonde hair and his physical build, which makes him pretty much the exact, you know, kind of clone, in some ways, of Sean Connery, because they’re built in almost exactly the same way. And he’s kind of like Bond in a lot of ways—he’s just as smart as he is, he’s just as physically capable, but he has no morality at all. He works for SPECTRE, and he’s as invaluable to them as James Bond is to MI6. At the end of the movie, when they fight on the Orient Express, it’s a real nail-biter because they both seem like they’re kicking the shit out of each other, and it’s so good. I think Robert Shaw is such a good actor and probably could have played James Bond. If you watch him when he’s pretending to be Colonel Nash, he’s all smooth and sophisticated—he really could have played the part. Man, does he ever make for a good villain.
Coming in at number four—Javier Bardem’s Silva, who I talked about a couple of weeks ago in my James Bond Revisited on Skyfall. Like Red Grant, he’s another shadow James Bond. He was a secret agent with a great relationship with Judi Dench’s M, but he was betrayed and left physically disfigured after being tortured by the Chinese, and now he wants revenge. Bond has been betrayed several times but always kind of shrugs it off because he’s honor-bound. Silva is not, and he wants revenge. And the ending of this movie is really powerful because you have Javier Bardem at the top of his game, acting opposite Judi Dench and Daniel Craig, neither of whom are slouches. Plus, they’ve got an amazing director, Sam Mendes. It’s emotional, it’s operatic—I think that he is terrific in this movie.
Coming in at number three—one of my favorite modern James Bond villains, and one that also might be a little bit controversial on this list—Robert Davi as Franz Sanchez in Licence to Kill. Now, what I really like about this part is that in the ’80s, drug-dealing villains were kind of all the rage, but they were always played as psychotic. Sanchez, while definitely a sadist—as you can see by his introduction, where he whips Lupe—is probably not psychotic.
You see, the thing that’s interesting about him is that you can really see that the character inspires loyalty among his men, specifically Benicio del Toro’s Dario, who I think is actually quite a good henchperson in this movie. He looks like a kid, and in fact, Del Toro was only about 21 when it was made, but you can really tell that he loves Sanchez and looks up to him like a big brother or a father. And Sanchez is very loyal to him—he doesn’t want to give him up, and his life is more important to him than money. That’s the thing about Sanchez—loyalty is the most important thing to him above all things, and it’s pretty amazing.
There’s a scene where Dario is being shredded at the end by Pam Bouvier, and he’s just screaming out “Sanchez!” over and over and over again because he wants his friend or his mentor to come and save him. But it doesn’t happen, and I almost kind of felt bad for Sanchez because you can tell he actually, in a weird way, wants to be friends with James Bond. Because when he thinks that Bond’s a mercenary, he kind of sees himself in him and wants to build him up to be kind of like the number-two man in his corporation. But, of course, he’s evil—he’s a drug dealer—he’s gotta die. And Robert Davi really gave his performance his all because I think Davi, in some ways, wanted to be a leading man and, in fact, would star in a lot of movies after this. It’s funny—John Glen said that in the audition for Talisa Soto, he had Robert Davi acting as James Bond, and he said, “You know what? He wasn’t half bad.”
Coming in at number two—Sean Bean as 006 in GoldenEye. Now, the interesting thing about Sean Bean was that he was one of the finalists to actually take over the role and could have easily played James Bond. But I think what made him cool as 006 is that he really does feel kind of like the other side of a coin for James Bond. He’s just one rank ahead of him, but unlike Bond, he doesn’t have that unassailable loyalty to the British Empire. In fact, his family, being Lienz Cossacks, were betrayed by the government, and he wants revenge. He also wants revenge against Bond because, by changing the detonators, he ended up with a scar. There’s also kind of a warmth between them, which I think is really cool, and their fight scene at the end is unbelievable because these are two guys that are clearly in their physical prime and just equally trained. It’s so good, and I remember getting really excited for Pierce Brosnan as James Bond after this scene because he was so good in the fight scenes. Unfortunately, the James Bond movies that followed with Pierce Brosnan kind of devolved into just generic shoot-’em-ups, which is too bad. In some ways, the Daniel Craig James Bond movies delivered on the promise of GoldenEye.
And coming in at number one—who else could it be but Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Now, I’ll give you this—not every actor that played Ernst Stavro Blofeld is good. When I’m talking about the best James Bond villains, I’m really talking about the early Blofeld—you know, the guy in the shadows with the signet ring and the cat in From Russia with Love and Thunderball. And then Donald Pleasence in You Only Live Twice. I mean, he really unnerved me as a kid with his bald head and his scar. You look in his eyes—he never blinks once. And that Nehru jacket is very creepy. I think he was terrific. And I also really like Telly Savalas in kind of a different take on the role in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He’s still bald, he still wears a Nehru jacket, but he doesn’t have the scar, and he’s a little bit more charismatic and a little bit more physically capable. He’s still got the cat, but you actually don’t see him holding the cat too much because I don’t think the cat actually liked Telly Savalas—or vice versa. However, the person that they got to play Blofeld afterward in Diamonds Are Forever—Charles Gray—was an absolute disaster.
Now, I like Charles Gray as an actor. He’s fun in kind of a camp way in Rocky Horror Picture Show, but he also plays Blofeld like he’s in Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s such a camp performance that doesn’t suit the movie at all. It’s just terrible, and I think he was awful in the role.
Now, of course, Blofeld did come back in a fashion in For Your Eyes Only, where Roger Moore drops him down a smokestack, but it’s kind of a goofy, jokey scene that they just did as a dig at Kevin McClory. And in fact, Kevin McClory would have his revenge two years later when he would come out with Never Say Never Again, which would have Blofeld as played by Max von Sydow. Although, I have to say—even though he’s a great actor—he doesn’t make much of an impact as Blofeld. In fact, Klaus Maria Brandauer is much better in that as the other villain. Also, Barbara Carrera is really good in that. But, you know, I didn’t really put any Never Say Never Again villains on this list because they’re not official James Bond villains.
Of course, there’s Christoph Waltz as Blofeld in Spectre, and I have to say, as a huge fan of Blofeld, I was very disappointed in his performance because Christoph Waltz is just too typical for that role. In fact, somebody suggested on my James Bond Revisited video on Spectre that they should have put Dave Bautista as Blofeld, and I think that kind of would have been amazing. I mean, he was great as Hinx the henchman, but man—if you watch Dave Bautista in some of his other movies like Blade Runner, you really kind of get the sense that he’s an amazing actor. And man, he would have been so good as the villain in this movie. He would have really delivered something, and they just didn’t allow him. They just cast him as a henchman because I think the casting choices in this one were a little bit narrow.
But you know what? They’ve recast Blofeld before—they could recast him again.
Anyway, those are my top ten favorite James Bond villains. I’m sure that a lot of you have different opinions than me. There were some that almost made the list but didn’t quite make it. Of course, there was Dr. No as played by Joseph Wiseman, but his role in the film is just too small for him to make the list. I also came very close to putting Christopher Lee on this for Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, but I just never liked his kind of scheme with the Solex Agitator—it felt tacked on, and he’s almost too sympathetic. And Bond is such an ass in that movie—it’s the only James Bond movie where I wanted the bad guy to win.
Most of the Pierce Brosnan Bond villains are all kind of terrible, and probably the worst James Bond villains of all time—even though it’s one of my favorite James Bond movies ever, strangely enough—is The Living Daylights, with Jeroen Krabbé as Koskov and Joe Don Baker as Whitaker. I mean, those guys are terrible. But man, what a great movie.
Of course, I’m sure I’ve overlooked a few favorites, but that’s what makes lists like this fun – everyone has their own opinions. So make sure to share yours with me in the talkbacks, and I’ll do my best to answer as many comments as possible!
