The late James Bond actor Sean Connery defined the iconic role, and the influence of his portrayal can be seen and felt in every 007 actor's performance that followed. With the Scottish star, who sadly ed away in October 2020, taking on the role in the first James Bond movie Dr. No in 1962, Connery’s Bond provided the blueprint for cinematic interpretations of Ian Fleming’s iconic character, and his influence can be seen in specific elements of each Bond actor that followed in his footsteps, no matter how different their versions of the character otherwise are.
At only 32, Connery was a relatively young Bond during his debut in the role, with Pierce Brosnan, Roger Moore, and Daniel Craig all being significantly older than the actor when they began their respective tenures as 007. But despite his youth, Connery provided an iconic interpretation of Bond and the rapid-fire release of his James Bond outings (a whopping 5 movies in 5 years before Lazenby's arrival) soon saw Connery’s Bond become the most culturally entrenched iteration of the character.
While each subsequent Bond has had their ups and downs, every version of the character has owed a specific debt to Connery’s interpretation of Ian Fleming’s super-spy. Whether it’s the decision by both Brosnan and Moore to lean into Bond’s campier elements, the more self-serious and hard-edged work of Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig, or even the heartbreaking, unexpectedly emotional Bond outing of one-film wonder George Lazenby, an element of what makes each later Bond work can be attributed to Connery’s singular charm and enduring vision for the character.
Roger Moore’s Winking Humor
As iconic as Roger Moore’s older, Austin Powers-spawning comical version of Bond is, the super-spy could never have had his most unabashedly silly outings if it weren’t for the streak of self-aware humor established as early as You Only Live Twice’s campy Blofeld face-off while Connery was still in the role. Connery may have played the deadpan straight man to his goofier antagonists where Moore was more in on the joke and theatrical in his version of Bond, but the more over-the-top elements of Connery’s Bond movies provided the basis for Moonraker, Octopussy, and the rest of Moore’s outright absurd, cartoony Bond adventures. After all, You Only Live Twice may seem subtle in comparison to the likes of A View to A Kill with its earthquake-engineering Christopher Walken, but the sight of Connery’s Bond trying (and failing) to disguise himself as a Japanese fisherman proves that the 007 series was never going to take itself too seriously.
George Lazenby’s Pathos
While the James Bond series never took itself too seriously, it did find room for real emotional weight. There is arguably no moment more tragic in the entire Bond series than Lazenby’s iteration of the character losing his wife at the closing moments of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. However, while the sight of a heartbroken Bond mourning the woman he finally decided to settle down for good with is unusually brutal for the escapist spy movies, this decision has its roots as far back as Connery’s crestfallen reaction to finding Jill Masterson's dead body in Goldfinger. It was this brutal moment that cemented the potentially silly James Bond franchise’s ability to pull off pathos, and Connery’s muted mourning is easily as affecting as Lazenby’s stoic grief. The image of Bond remaining stone-faced in moments of emotional devastation has lasted into Daniel Craig’s recent outings as the character, and it’s another emotional element that has its origins in the performances of Connery in the role.
Timothy Dalton’s Edge
Unlike Moore’s more over-the-top James Bond, Timothy Dalton took the character in a more realistic direction during his pair of outings as Bond. During Dalton’s tenure in the role, Bond was no longer a figure of fun but rather a suave though tough spy who was constantly on edge and hyper-aware of potential subterfuge. It’s an appropriate sense of distrust to imbue the character with during the Cold War of the 1980s, an era when international espionage was once again in the real-world news. The result was a pair of underrated movies that are often far more serious than the playful, goofy Bond of the late seventies, which critics lauded as an innovation. But this more grounded characterization of Bond is actually one which can be traced to the surprisingly serious early Connery vehicle From Russia With Love, where paranoia and tension are as much a presence as gadgets and girls. Dalton’s Bond borrowed some of Connery’s tense, terse mannerisms from this flick, resulting in a more glib version of Bond that, in turn, ended up being a big influence on Daniel Craig’s later PTSD-afflicted Bond from Casino Royale onwards.
Pierce Brosnan’s Campiness
After Dalton’s Bond took the character down the darkest route he had traveled since Lazenby’s short-lived run as 007, Pierce Brosnan brought back the cheeky self-aware humor that Roger Moore is often credited with adding to the role. However, it’s actually Connery that influenced the Irish actor’s expressive version of the spy, with both their iterations jumping from goofy humor to more serious action heroism in an instant. Where Roger Moore’s Bond was firmly rooted in the comical side of 007 (mostly due to the actor’s advancing age rendering more grounded action sequences a little ludicrous, as well as the growing popularity of sci-fi films making the plots of movies like Moonraker more over-the-top), both Connery and Brosnan’s Bonds balanced humor with genuine intensity. The actors both brought a brooding toughness to the role that shined through their superficial charm and quips, although Brosnan’s last outing, the understandably maligned Die Another Day, saw the actor abandon this edge in favor of purely camp.
Daniel Craig’s Physicality
For all the staginess of early Bond fights (which, as The Manchurian Candidate proves, were a prerequisite for even the greatest of early sixties thrillers) Connery leaned into the physicality of the character and produced some stellar (if a little dated) fight scenes. It’s this surprisingly brutal edge whose influence can be seen in Craig’s rugged, punchy Bond. The Layer Cake actor was handed the unenviable task of recreating Bond for a post-Bourne audience, a seemingly impossible task that meant maintaining the character’s larger-than-life self-aware humor while also leaning into the bleak, hyper-realistic brutality of 00s spy thrillers like Green Zone, Body of Lies, and the Bourne trilogy. To pull this off, Craig returned to Connery’s early James Bond outings for inspiration, where realistic close fight choreography grounded the more over-the-top elements of the spy series.
