The actor who refused to be the first James Bond villain: “What could you have been thinking of?”

Posted On January 11, 2026January 11, 2026

Over the last 60 years, the James Bond franchise has served up countless memorable villains for MI6’s finest to thwart in their plans of world domination, and as archetypal as many of them have been, the lure of playing the big bad in a 007 blockbuster continues to attract top-tier actors.

The most recent instalment, No Time to Die, featured Academy Award winner Rami Malek on villainous duties, and he was preceded by Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz in Spectre, and Academy Award winner Javier Bardem in Skyfall. The less said about Matthieu Amalric’s Dominic Greene, the better, but Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre ensured that Daniel Craig enjoyed an impressive array of antagonists.

From Oddjob and Jaws to Scaramanga and Renard via Max Zorin and Blofeld, Bond has pitted his wits against foreboding figures, scenery-chewing hams, and duplicitous schemers, but only one actor will be remembered forever as the first-ever Bond villain. Admittedly, though, they weren’t too thrilled about it in the long run.

A respected stage and screen actor, Joseph Wiseman thought that Dr No would be little more than “B-grade mystery” when he signed on to play Dr No opposite Sean Connery’s secret agent, and as his career continued, he began to resent the film for being the one thing everybody always wanted to ask him about, with the history-making distinction of being the titular baddie weighing increasingly heavy.

He wasn’t the first choice for the part, with Ian Fleming suggesting that one of his friends do it. It wasn’t quite rampant nepotism, since they were an established and acclaimed actor, filmmaker, playwright, composer, and raconteur who made a sizeable cultural impact, but after reading the book, Noël Coward pointed out that he was all wrong for the role.

In fact, when he finished reading it, he felt compelled to pen Fleming a letter. “This is just to inform you that I have read Dr No from cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed every moment. But as the gentleman in Oklahoma! sings about Kansas City: “You’ve gone about as fur as you ken go.” I am willing to accept the centipede, the tarantulas, the land crabs, the giant squid.”

“I am even willing to forgive your reckless use of invented verbs; ‘I inch, Thou inch, He snakes, I snake, We palp, They palp’, etc,” Coward continued. “But what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is 11 am in Jamaica, it is 6 am in dear old England. This, dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie.”

Time zone discrepancies aside, he also had an issue with some of the “lascivious” language used, even though he was aware that “we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays,” asking Fleming a simple, “Really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?”

Still, that didn’t deter the author from giving Coward first dibs on playing Dr No, and his response via telegram made his feelings perfectly clear: “The answer to Dr No is ‘No, No, No!’” That was that, and Wiseman got the gig, but Fleming’s first choice did visit the set during shooting to see what all the fuss was about.

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