The Woman Behind the New James Bond Also Cast Your Favourite Movies & TV Shows
Who Amazon Studios should hire as the next James Bond is a question that’s been on the minds of everyone from studio executives to tabloid journalists ever since Daniel Craig announced he was stepping down as 007.
His swan song in No Time to Die came almost five years ago now, which also means that the record six-and-a-half year gap between Bond movies License to Kill and GoldenEye will surely be broken. So yes, this process is taking forever, but at least we can rest assured that the decision is in good hands.
Indeed, when Amazon bought the Bond IP from the Broccoli family, they decided to go clean slate and assemble their own team for the project. First came the announcement that Steven Knight was writing the script and that Denis Villeneuve would direct. Then we learned that Nina Gold was coming in as casting director, taking over a position that Debbie McWilliams had held for the previous 13 Bonds in a row — a run that went all the way back to For Your Eyes Only in 1981.
If fans are nervous about McWilliams leaving — she did, after all, cast both Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig — there is plenty of solace to be taken from the list of movies and shows that Gold has been responsible for populating in the last 30 years.
Read on to learn a bit more about each of them and use the guide to find out where to stream them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
After making her name as the regular casting director for Mike Leigh (Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake), Gold got to have an early brush with Bond (in a way) when she was hired to cast Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz.
This was the second film in Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy so Gold didn’t have to worry about the lead roles, but she did do a wonderful job when it came to helping Wright flesh out the rural town of Sandford. For this, she brought in a who’s who of British talent, including Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, and Olivia Coleman, but it was the casting of former 007 Timothy Dalton as the antagonist that captured the headlines.
If you look a little further down the cast list of Hot Fuzz, you’ll find Rory McCann — an actor who Gold would look to once again when she sat down at the offices of HBO with the task of bringing not just a rural English town to life but the entire world of Westeros.
That show, of course, became Game of Thrones, a project that was so successful that it basically launched a generation of British actors — including Emilia Clarke, Kit Harrington and Sophie Turner — while simultaneously elevating a few already established stars (like Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage) to another level. For his part, McCann went on to give a phenomenal turn as Sandor "The Hound" Clegane, appearing in 39 episodes, including the pilot and (we forgive him) the climactic eighth season.
Turning a beloved children's TV show and national treasure into a major motion picture is a deceptively tricky job to pull off. Luckily, director Paul King had Nina Gold to turn to when it came to casting his partially live-action iteration of Paddington.
This is actually quite an interesting one, as I’d never realised that Gold had essentially turned to some of her old Mike Leigh collaborators — namely the perfectly cast duo of Broadbent (Topsy Turvy) and Sally Hawkins (who Gold worked with on Happy-Go-Lucky). For the title voice role, she also clearly nailed it by bringing in Ben Whishaw — who’d only just had his first run as Q in Skyfall two years earlier.
Without putting too fine a point on it, casting Star Wars: The Force Awakens was probably the most challenging, hotly anticipated, and fiercely guarded job of its kind in the 21st century, yet I would guess that even the new trilogy’s fiercest critics would agree that Gold knocked it out of the park.
It wasn’t just about bringing Ford, Hamill, Fisher and co. back; it was about finding new heroes that a whole new generation could get behind. For Rey, alone, Gold went through seven months of auditions before landing on Daisy Ridley. She also picked up John Boyega from the very Edgar Wright-esque movie Attack the Block, and saw a fighter pilot in Oscar Isaac — who at the time was best known for playing a crumpled folk singer in Inside Llewyn Davis. Sadly, parts of Episode VIII and Episode IX let the characters down, but the performances were never less than charming.
Gold first collaborated with Ridley Scott in 2012 on Prometheus — a job that included getting Michael Fassbender to play an android — but their work together on The Martian was arguably more impressive.
If you haven’t seen it in a while, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the move was just Matt Damon making potatoes on Mars, when in fact there is a whole galaxy of slightly offbeat stars in this movie: like Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Sean Bean (him again), pre-MCU Benedict Wong, Sebastian Stan, pre-Ted Lasso Nick Mohammed, and even Childish Gambino.
Whether you’re a fan of The Crown or not, this six-season Netflix anthology series boasts one of the most impressive feats of casting in recent TV history. For this massive project, Gold not only had to cast a century’s worth of royal family members, prime ministers, and public figures, she also had to change the central stars every season or so to keep up with the passing decades.
If you were able to suspend disbelief when Claire Foy turned into Olivia Colman in The Crown Season 3, who then turned into Imelda Staunton in Season 5, you have Gold to thank for that. We can also thank her for helping to make stars out of Josh O’Connor (Challengers), Vanessa Kirby (Fantastic Four), and Emma Corrin (Deadpool & Wolverine).
Another historical recreation show that Gold worked on was Craig Mazin’s acclaimed 2019 miniseries Chernobyl — a gripping account of the Ukrainian nuclear disaster that rocked the world in 1986. It’s a truly harrowing little series, but if you can stomach it, it’s vital viewing.
For this one, Gold brought in a few notable heavyweights in Jared Harris (Mad Men), Emily Watson, and Stellan Skarsgård, while yet again providing a platform for a batch of up-and-comers to show what they could do — most notably the Irish duo of Barry Keoghan (Saltburn) and Jessie Buckley (Hamnet).
A few years after Chernobyl, Gold called Skarsgård again with a role that could well go down as one of the finest in the actor’s career — and this is a guy who’s been in Oscar and Palme d’Or winning movies and most of the biggest franchises around.
The part, of course, was the pyrrhic rebel leader Luthen Rael in Andor — a Star Wars and Rogue One prequel series that some believe to be the best thing that George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away has ever produced. Alongside him, the show provided star-making roles to Denise Gough and Adria Arjona and even introduced Fiona Shaw to a whole new audience with her role as Maarva in Season 1.
Another iconic modern TV show that Gold has on her CV (and that might offer some clues for her approach to Bond) is Slow Horses, an adaptation of author Will Smith’s best-selling modern-day spy novels.
Her work on this one is already proving influential on the UK scene, and not just because Gary Oldman has basically quit movies as he’s having so much fun playing the lead role. Just a few years in, we’ve already seen a few stars emerge with the likes of Jack Lowden and Olivia Cooke, but it’s the way that the show has helped to relaunch some careers — if you haven’t bought Sophie Okonedo stock yet, now’s the time — that really impresses.
Gold’s most recent casting masterclass was Edward Berger’s 2024 Oscar winner Conclave — an enthralling movie about the backroom wheeling and dealing that presumably goes on in the Vatican whenever a new Pontiff must be chosen.
Gold came into this one on the back of The Two Popes, where she had perfectly cast Anthony Hopkins and Johnathan Pryce as Benedict and Francis, respectively; but her work on this one, thanks to the wonderful performances of Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow, was just as good. It’s just a shame that they hadn’t reintroduced the Oscar for best casting by that year’s ceremony. As far as that kind of gold is concerned, however, I imagine it will only be a matter of time.
