New cast­ing for Bond 25 revealed in broad­cast from Jamaica

Show busi­ness is all about spec­ta­cle. For exam­ple, if you’re James Bond pro­duc­ers Michael G Wil­son and Bar­bara Broc­coli, and you want to dom­i­nate a press cycle, you throw a ​“Bond 25 live reveal” in Jamaica simul­cast online.

No need to spec­i­fy what will or will not be revealed; peo­ple will tune in, and then once you’ve got their atten­tion, it won’t mat­ter that the only thing you’ve got to unveil is ter­tiary cast­ing announce­ments. This is, as it hap­pens, pre­cise­ly what took place today.

While 007 super­fans eager­ly tuned in this morn­ing in antic­i­pa­tion of a title for the 25^th film fea­tur­ing the world’s great­est spy, they were some­what under­whelmed to learn from Broc­coli and Wil­son that the project remains unnamed. No news of who might be tak­ing over the tuxe­do after cur­rent star Daniel Craig excus­es him­self fol­low­ing this film, either.

Today’s only new infor­ma­tion con­cerns cast­ing beyond the pre­vi­ous­ly con­firmed Rami Malek, who por­trays the film’s vil­lain. He’ll be joined in an unspec­i­fied capac­i­ty by Bil­ly Mag­nussen, Ana de Armas, Dali Benssalah, Lashana Lynch, and David Den­cik. And, as pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed, Phoebe Waller-Bridge will be on script­ing duties, which sug­gests a wel­come change of tone for the franchise.

In addi­tion to Craig, return­ing stars also include Ralph Fiennes as head hon­cho M, Lea Sey­doux as beguil­ing doc­tor Madeleine Swann, Ben Whishaw as tech whiz Q, Naomie Har­ris as the no-non­sense Miss Mon­eypen­ny, Jef­frey Wright as CIA liai­son Felix Leit­er, and Rory Kin­n­ear as MI6 chief of staff Bill Tanner.

The day’s biggest devel­op­ment was instead the post­ing of the sub­lime­ly unset­tling video below, a record­ed mes­sage from Malek, who couldn’t join the group due to pri­or oblig­a­tions. There’s an inef­fa­ble creepi­ness to his lilt­ing cadence of speech, though the guy’s play­ing a glob­al mega­lo­ma­ni­ac of some sort, so that’s prob­a­bly what he’s going for. Even so, haunt­ing stuff.