Why Patrick McGoohan turned down playing James Bond
Over the decades, there have been many actors whose names have circled that of James Bond, but of those, only a tiny number can claim to have actually been offered the role. In 1961, when Bond honchos Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were first scouting for a man to embody Ian Fleming’s suave, debonair, womanising super spy, there was one actor who seemed a shoe-in.
At that time, Danger Man was one of TV’s biggest shows, and its star, Patrick McGoohan, one of its most lusted-after leading men, not to mention being TV’s highest-paid actor. It wasn’t a huge stretch then, to picture the man playing this brooding NATO-assigned secret agent as James Bond 007.
Had he accepted, it likely would have turned McGoohan into one of the most bankable actors in the world, only this New York-born, Irish-raised thirty-something simply wasn’t interested.
"[McGoohan] might have made a fine Bond," Albert R ‘Cubby’ Broccoli wrote in his autobiography, "but he was strongly religious and was uneasy about sex and violence."
Other actors have turned down Bond over years, but Patrick McGoohan remains the only one — that we know of, anyway — that’s said no to the role on moral grounds. And that fierce moralism was even on display in Danger Man.
Unlike those other small screen heroes of the 1960s, like Simon Templar or Jason King or Adam Adamant, NATO’s John Drake was no twinkly-eyed lothario. And though there was the occasional burst of violence in Danger Man, it wasn’t usually the blast of a gun. Drake was handy with his fists, but never carried a firearm. That, it appears, was too much for McGoohan.
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"I thought there was too much emphasis on sex and violence," the actor once said. "It has an insidious and powerful influence on children. Would you like your son to grow up like James Bond? Since I hold these views strongly as an individual and parent I didn’t see how I could contribute to the very things to which I objected."
McGoohan’s initial involvement in Danger Man was agreed on the proviso that anything salacious be excised from the scripts. One of the series’ screenwriters, Ian Stuart Black, is quoted in the book Not a Number – Patrick McGoohan: A Life as saying: "He was absolutely furious because I had him lying on a bed with a girl in order to open a safe which was behind the bed, nothing more. Pat was white-faced with anger because of this apparently dishonest sexual implication."
McGoohan was unapologetic, it seems, about his puritanical attitude to sex and violence, telling one interviewer: "Call me prissy Pat, [but] I see TV as the third parent. Every week a different girl? Served up piping hot for tea? With the children and grannies watching?"
The actor would take this philosophy into his most famous TV project. The Prisoner in all its avant-garde glory remains one of the most loved and pored over shows ever, and McGoohan had his creative fingerprints all over it.
As well as starring (as an unnamed former secret agent who is kidnapped and imprisoned in a mysterious village), he co-created the series and wrote and directed many of its most outre episodes. But watch closely and you’ll see how unusually chaste his character, Number Six, is, getting near to various women, without ever kissing, let alone bedding them.
The actor’s personal morality was so inflexible that it sometimes caused friction on set. Movie director David Cronenberg would work with McGoohan on the 1981 film Scanners, and later revealed quite how intolerant McGoohan could be, after he clashed with one of his fellow actors, the (at the time) three-times married Jennifer O’Neill.
"He had extreme Catholic views about sexuality, which came onto the set," Cronenberg recalled. "My leading lady... came to me incredibly distraught and said, 'Patrick said, "Are you a whore? Are you a slut?"' And he started to lay into her because she'd had, like, five [sic] husbands.
"That was Patrick, and those were the things I had to deal with as a relatively young director. He was probably the most difficult actor I ever worked with, though he gave a fantastic performance."
There’s little doubt that if Patrick McGoohan had wanted the part of James Bond in 1961 it would have been his. But it was never going to be. The character of agent 007 was simply too licentious and too cold-blooded, for a man with McGoohan’s strict moral code, and Broccoli and Saltzman were never likely to jettison those essential traits of Bond just to soothe their leading man’s conscience.
In the end, of course, it was McGoohan’s Hell Drivers co-star Sean Connery who would breathe cinematic life into Ian Fleming’s gun-toting skirt-chaser, while McGoohan would go on to create one of British television’s most iconic shows.
As British TV’s highest-paid actor of the early 60s, Patrick McGoohan probably could have become one of its biggest movie stars if he’d had wanted it enough, but he was never willing to sell out his faith.
"I have two guiding lights before me, every second of my working day," the actor, who died in 2009, once said. "The first is my daughters. The second, my religion. You know, every hero since Jesus Christ has been moral… Like John Drake, he fought his battles fiercely but honourably."
