When Connery agreed to return, Gavin was kicked to the curb. And when Connery did leave for good (at least as far as Eon’s concerned, having reprised the role for Never Say Never Again) and his successor Roger Moore considered retiring, Brocolli once again looked at an American, nearly hiring James Brolin for the part. Brolin even did screen tests for Octopussy, a film for which Moore eventually returned.
Even more than those folks, Dick Van Dyke made a certain sense, as he starred in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a kid’s movie produced by Cubby Brocolli and based on an Ian Fleming novel. But, as with the other Yanks, Van Dyke couldn’t get over the character’s inherent Englishness. “I said, ‘Have you heard my British accent?’” he joked, miming that the discussion then ended abruptly. But, for him, it went further than that.
“It would have been a great experience,” Van Dyke admitted, but also worried that his fans wouldn’t have “accepted” him in the part, to say nothing of the Bond aficionados. This isn’t to say that Van Dyke hasn’t played his share of villains, having played a grouchy silent star in 1969’s The Comic and a murderous photographer in an episode of Columbo, as well as traumataizing a generation of kids as the surprise villain in Night at the Museum.
It’s just that he never could see himself as the type of guy who would order a shaken martini instead of singing Chim Chim Cher-ee.
