The only James Bond films I’ve watched are Dr. No, and then three Craig films – Skyfall, Quantum of Solace, and Casino Royale. However, I also watch a bunch of reaction videos on YouTube, and I’m currently watching a young woman react to the Bond franchise. She just finished Diamonds are Forever.
I’ve noticed that, in these early films anyway, the performances put in by the characters that are ostensibly American are just appalling. My guess is that it’s because they were portrayed by B-list British actors doing what passed for an American accent at a British film studio in the 1960s and 1970s. But surely they’ve done location shots in America over the decades; does the franchise use (almost) exclusively British talent, or have they used local (and apparently, really really bad) talent as well?
Can you give us some examples of British actors playing Americans in James Bond movies? It wouldn’t be too surprising. Movies are often filmed wherever it’s cheapest to film. They just set the stage to look like where the movie is supposedly going on. It’s cheaper to film in the U.K. than the U.S.
They’ve definitely done location shots. Unless I’m horribly mistaken, you’re kind of thin on deserts in the British Isles, and I’ve seen some desert shots here and there. Also, the very first Bond film had some location shots in Jamaica.
Felix Leiter has been played by numerous actors. The Sean Connery category included Jack Lord (Dr No), Cec Linder (Goldfinger), Rick Van Nutter (Thunderball), and Norman Burton (Diamonds Are Forever). They were all Americans except for Linder, who was Canadian.
Honor Blackman, aka Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, was British, not American as her accent implied.
Bruce Boa, who played the USAF General in Octopussy, was Canadian as well. In the '70s and '80s, he was Britain’s go-to actor whenever an American was needed.
I’m a Bond nerd and I can’t think of any American characters played by Brits offhand. They’re all played by North Americans (to include one or two Canadians!)
This is really irrelevant to the question here, but the first James Bond film had many American actors. That’s because James Bond was American in it. There was a 1954 episode of the American television series Climax! based on the 1953 novel Casino Royale. Bond worked for an American intelligence agency. The actors came from various countries. It was filmed on a studio set in Los Angeles.
I’m going to hijack this thread for a second by saying Diamonds are Forever has the worst stereotypes of how Brits think Americans are although it did give us one of the best James Bond movie lines ever.
“I didn’t know there was a pool there.”.
For what it’s worth, especially since you seem to primarily be referring to the early films, it wasn’t until the seventh Bond film (Diamonds are Forever, 1971) that they filmed more than a small amount in the U.S.
Even in Goldfinger (1964), which centered on a plot to rob Fort Knox, filming in the U.S. was limited to a small number of exterior shots in the Fort Knox area, and a few days of shooting (with a small crew) in Miami.
You wonder if who had an inferiority complex? As I said, the movie (or more precisely, the episode of the television show) had Bond being an American working for an American intelligence agency. Remember, nobody watching the show knew anything about James Bond except a few of the Americans watching the show who had gotten hold of a year-old copy of a book printed in the U.K. Nobody except those few thought of it as being anything except a completely new story.
Bruce Boa and Ed Bishop were the two actors you hired if you wanted an ‘genuine’ American, but couldn’t afford a Hollywood name, and those two cropped up again and again in the 1970s. (though Boa was Canadian, but that’s close enough for us, we can’t tell the difference)