Ever since Daniel Craig’s 007 was killed off there’s been a worry that the next James Bond will tick all the fashionable diversity boxes that have doomed many recent films to box office failure. The rumours are, however, that a straight white man (yes, an actual biological male) has been offered the iconic role.
Don’t get too excited, though. As cishet males go, 33 year-old Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a wokester’s dream: a self-declared “feminist” house husband who grows his own kale and took the name of his wife, who is 24 years older than him. How’s that for gender equality, chauvinists?
The role hasn’t been confirmed. According to the Mail, a source has said: “Bond is Aaron’s job, should he wish to accept it. The formal offer is on the table and they are waiting to hear back.” But there isn’t a script or a director yet, so this may all just be rumours.
In October, Bond producer Barbara Broccoli talked about “a big, big road ahead, re-inventing [Bond] for the next chapter”, adding: “We haven’t even begun with that.”
So who is Aaron Taylor-Johnson? At the age of 18 he was cast as the lead in the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, where he fell for the film’s director Sam Taylor-Wood, 24 years his senior, whom he later married — now 57 to his 33.
The Mail‘s Alison Boshoff explains:
Unusually the besotted groom opted to take one part of his wife’s names, Taylor, when they married — so they both became Taylor-Johnson.
“I just don’t see why women need to take the man’s name. I wanted to be a part of her as much as she wanted to be part of me,” he said.
In fact, there is no more conspicuously lovey-dovey couple in showbusiness.
When Sam celebrated her 50th birthday in 2017, Aaron had her name tattooed on his chest alongside a hummingbird. She had his name inked on her collarbone in June 2021.
Aaron seems to be happiest as a house-husband:
In the early years, home was a £13 million pile in Primrose Hill, North London. Aaron saw movie success as weedy hero Dave Lizewski in comedy Kick-Ass, but he also gladly spent extended periods as a house-husband, looking after their daughters Wylda Rae, now 13, and Romy Hero, 11, plus the two daughters Sam has from her marriage to [Jay] Jopling — Jessie, now 16, and Angelica, 26.
At one point, the school run was so complex — involving drop-offs at four separate schools — that both Aaron and Sam had to do it.
In 2013, Sam took on the direction of Fifty Shades Of Grey in Canada, and took her family along for the duration. Aaron was happy to be in a supporting role. “He’s like: ‘No no, I like being an at-home dad, doing the cooking’,” Sam said.
He agreed: “I wanted, purely, to be with my babies, I didn’t want to be away from them. I battled with what that would be like.”
The family then spent some time in Los Angeles, while Aaron acted in a couple of Marvel films and won acclaim for his role in Tom Ford’s 2016 drama Nocturnal Animals.
In 2022 they returned to the U.K., putting down roots in a listed rural farmhouse in Somerset.
He has settled into country life, saying earlier this year: “I get the opportunity to fly around the world and meet new people. It’s very glamorous and I work on great projects. But when I’m home in the countryside… that’s my place where I can put my feet in the earth and feel grounded.”
He added: “I have got kale and things like that; I had pumpkins last season. I have chickens, I have two pigs, I’ve got two cows. I very much have sort of a homestead.”
Previously Aaron declared that he is “happy to say I’m a feminist. Being a feminist is just believing in equal rights. Man, woman, gay, straight, black, white – we’re all in it together.”
It’s almost like he’s been preparing his whole life to take on the role of the legendary spy. At least, the version that Hollywood wants to serve up in 2024.
Of course, what will really matter is the quality of the plot and script and the performance of the cast. But if the rumoured pick of the leading man is anything to go by, brace for another wokefest.
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During Covid there seemed to be state control of the newspapers only it was the pernicious British government via the advertising spend.
Indeed – which is worse? Hard to say. The British government doesn’t appear to be acting on behalf of the British people and appears to be “follow” directives from “foreign” or “global” entities.
Also what about the BBC? That seems pretty foreign to me, in that it doesn’t share values with me and a lot of others. It’s also controlled by a government.
Well that’s cleared things up.
Foreign states will not be allowed to take over British news organisations but Foreign organisations are allowed to take over the British government.
Nice and tidy.
Chinese sponsorship of UK newspaper will probably also still be allowed. Makes one wonder if the UAE guy perhaps failed to grease the right wheels.
Brown envelopes? British government? Heaven forbid!
Not forgetting all the foreign nationals (aka illegal immigrants) taking over British hotels and holiday camps.
But foreign individuals will still be able to shower them with cash a la Dr Gates presumably.
Can anyone in Scotland attest to this? You have ‘Hate Crime Reporting Centres’ moonlighting as sex shops? WTF is this??
”The Scottish Government has created walk-in snitching centres in every major Scottish city where people can report ‘hate crimes’ under the new Hate Crime and Public Order Act and the one in Glasgow is in a sex shop!
Welcome to Humza Yousaf’s Scotland, where you can go shopping for a dildo and report a ‘hate crime’ at the same time.”
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1767852719761445249
Condoming innocent people…
I would read between the lines. They obviously see a certain pathway ahead that they aren’t speaking about and they are trying to be a step ahead. It would be nice to think that their strategems represent a well-informed attempt to save our future but it is far from this. Just look at the events of the last five years. You can see the level of capture, which has necessitated a level of ineptitude. The strange spectacle of Joe Biden. At first I was a little perplexed why they even let him out in public. And then it was obvious. He is meant to look that way for a number of reasons foremost among them being the tacit cry for help of the Western mythos. Then you had the mad dog theory of war, look it up. And then the arrrogance of victory of the corporate state showing you what they can get away with. Just soberly look at it all. People with huge fibrous growths in their veins and they don’t seem too troubled about it at all. Surely this suggests a lack of vitality and a fatalism resigned to death of our culture.
State ownership or funding of British news organisations (whether they’re foreign states or our own) should be banned. That includes the state funding of the BBC.
There are cliches like ‘the breakdown of the rule of law’. This doesn’t even come close to what is coming. It will come via fifth dimensional warfare on one hand and deepening lassitude among the general public on the other. It might be demoralisation or it might be ill-health and the two will merge into one. You could easily look at the status quo and think that it isn’t even worth bothering with. But that is to give in to the force we oppose. The violinist Jascha Haifetz broke one of his strings during a performance and carried on playing until the end with three strings. Afterwards somebody asked him why he carried on and he said that it is our duty to carry on and try to make something beautiful even with just three strings. Anything less means that you have capitulated.
The whole discussion is ludicrous given the takeover of local radio in the mid 1990s. Local radio was very important largely because ir was decentralised. We weren’t all born under a Chrstmas tree and as Milan Kunera said, the power of man over tyranny is the power of memory over forgetting,
But Foreign Ownership of UK transport, energy, water supplies, steel industry, care homes, government computer systems, supermarkets, and vast tracts of British land, for example, are fine. Well that’s a relief.