The biggest surprise for the upcoming 25th James Bond movie No Time to Die wasn’t that it would be Daniel Craig‘s final time as Ian Fleming’s 007 (something he’d been hinting at for years), it was that none other than Fleabag and Killing Eve creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge had helped write the screenplay. A version of the script had already been developed and written beforehand but the Emmy winning scribe was reportedly brought in to “add humor” to the movie. In a new interview however, Waller-Bridge revealed that her work came as a surprise and was slightly more involved.
“[I was asked to do] dialogue polishes and to offer things really. It’s about just offering different alternatives,” she said on The Chris Evans (not that one) Breakfast Show on Virgin Radio UK. “They did give me some scenes and then be like, ‘Can you write some alternatives for this or have another idea about where it could go in the middle or how it would end?’And then I would just give them options and various scenes and then they would take what they want. But there was a lot people writing – the director [Cary Fukunaga] was a writer on it as well. And there’d been a few writers before.”
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She also revealed that she worked directly with Daniel Craig as well, who reportedly requested she be brought in after becoming a fan of her work. Waller-Bridge said she had “many great conversations” with Craig about the film. The writer also stopped short of calling her work on the movie a dream come true but revealed she had previously considered how cool it would have been to work on the franchise.
“I was in the edit for Fleabag. It was an afternoon, and I had the call that Barbara wanted to meet me. The strangest thing is, is that I’d really… I had been sort of dreaming about the idea of it only a few months beforehand. I was like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to be involved in a Bond film’ to sort of just put that there in the ether. And then it just came around.”
The full synopsis for No Time to Die, which debuts in theaters on April 8, reads:
“In NO TIME TO DIE, Bond has left active service and is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica,” the film’s synopsis reads. “His peace is short-lived when his old friend Felix Leiter from the CIA turns up asking for help. The mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist turns out to be far more treacherous than expected, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.”
(H/T The Independent)
