Across his tenure as 007, Daniel Craig’s James Bond has faced some genuinely despicable villains. There was Casino Royale’s ball-battering, bloody-eyed Le Chiffre, with a brilliant turn from Mads Mikkelsen, and the shadowy Mr. White pulling the strings. Skyfall gave us Javier Bardem’s vengeful, menacing cyberterrorist Raoul Silva. And most recently in Spectre we got Christoph Waltz in the return of the biggest Bond baddie of all: Ernst Stavro Blofeld. (Quantum Of Solace’s vanilla Dominic Greene hasn’t quite entered the pantheon of great antagonists.) Now with the 25th Bond movie, No Time To Die, just a matter of months away, it’s time to look forward to an all-new villain.
“We’ve thrown the book at him on this one,” teases Barbara Broccoli in an exclusive report from Empire’s upcoming 2020 Preview Issue – and by ‘the book’, she means Rami Malek’s Safin. “He is really the supervillain. He’s the one that really gets under Bond’s skin. He’s a nasty piece of work.” Thankfully, Bond will have plenty of allies on his side – with the return of Jeffrey Wright’s Felix Leiter, Ben Whishaw’s Q, and Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny. Plus, he’ll have fresh back-up from Captain Marvel’s Lashana Lynch, playing new character Nomi.
Read more about No Time To Die in the new issue of Empire, arriving on newsstands on Thursday 31 October – and find out exactly what kind of havoc Safin wreaks when No Time To Die arrives in UK cinemas on 2 April 2020.