Numlock Sunday: Stephen Follows and the International Man of Mystery

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Stephen Follows who is out with a new video all about the casting of Bond. Casting James Bond is a particularly hard task, even for Amazon, and Stephen breaks down why. We also talked rankings, scoring, and who the next Bond might be.

Stephen and I are pals, we were both obsessed with data and the movies at around the same time, and his newsletter is one of my favorite reads. This project is one of the videos from his new YouTube channel, which I recommend checking out. You can read about the video over at his newsletter too, if that’s more your thing.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Stephen, how’s it going, man? It’s good to see you.

Thanks. Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

It is always, always good to catch up. You are one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite collaborators. Let’s talk a little bit about James Bond. You were out recently with a fascinating video all about who the next James Bond will be. I really just love how you framed this question and how you attacked it. So do you want to talk about why this is a very strange moment in the history of Bond and why this pick is pretty, pretty important?

I think that the interesting thing is that I’m not coming from the point of view of who should Bond, be in a subjective sense. I’m not sitting there telling you who I think. In fact, I won’t tell you who, but some of the people that come up in the process I did are not the people I would want to watch as a consumer.

But what I can do is have a look at the problem that Amazon faces and think about if I were against my own, against my wishes, strapped to the chair and told to figure this out, how would I go about it? And what is in the smoking rooms that Amazon has, I’m sure in the back rooms, where the three people that matter are making the decision, how are they doing this?

Bond is such a fascinating problem because it’s a one-shot deal, as in for the next 10, 15 years, you have one Bond. Changing them all the time wouldn’t be a good idea. No one would want that. You also need to have a certain set of requirements, which we can talk about in a minute. Some are really hard, but most of them have a level of softness to them. In the sense that you could choose to make anything you want, but then there’s this very established, very conservative audience who will not like changes. So how do you create something new, fresh, different and perhaps aligned with where you want to be as creatives, at the same time, delivering the exact same thing that people already expect without them telling you that it’s tired or cliched or old.

When you pick it apart and think about it analytically, it pulls on most elements of the industry, IP, casting, creativity, human beings, which is often factored in last. So I very much enjoy trying to think about, oh my God, how would I even begin?

I love the presentation of the problem because you had this really fascinating stat in the video that you alluded to just a moment ago, which is that the Bond audience is lowecase-c “conservative” in no small part because they are the oldest audience of any major franchise. But it presents a challenge in a way that you can’t just hire the first TikToker who might be able to play a superhero.

Yeah, and it’s a challenge in a number of ways because not only is there a larger body of work, meaning that there are over 25 films where people have seen a certain thing and so they will draw conclusions from that, but also because it’s happened over such a long period of time, people have drawn their own conclusions from their childhood and from their adulthood and things like that. And because the audience themselves are old, now, I wouldn’t for a second say that you or I are old, Walt, but these young kids today are willing to have new ideas that I do not count as old. As humans age, we tend to get more set in our ways. And also with movies and things like that, when it comes back to, we remember the childhood that we had and we maybe enjoyed the movies as a kid, we don’t wanna see anything deviate from that pattern.

Because they’re physically old, because the franchise is old and because the franchise has twice the body of work that Fast and the Furious has, you actually end up with a very calcified impression of who this should be and what it should be. And you don’t have as much room to play with. You can’t really reinvent it.

The analysis is super fun. Before we talk, I would encourage everyone to watch it. I don’t really think that we’re gonna spoil too much from it, honestly, in our conversation here.

Go for it, it’s about a process. Also, the videos are for fun, I don’t think you can spoil it.

Your approach is really exciting to watch happen in real time. I’ll let you describe what the various different boxes that had to be checked or criteria that had to be addressed were. But you basically take, here’s every single person on IMDb and then bit by bit, reduce it down to a shockingly manageable number.

Yeah, you could, as a casting director, meet everyone who was a viable candidate. And what I mean by that is you can already work out who you invite in the room. And if they don’t turn up to your room, they’ve already filtered themselves out. So, actually you can meet them. Now, does that help? I don’t know.

Stephen Follows

Let’s say that we were making a brand new film that was low budget and you needed an action star, it would have a lot more to do with who’s a good actor, who’s available, and you could probably have tens of thousands of people as candidates. Bond isn’t like that because some of the criteria is involving fame and notoriety.

I remember I did a study about 10 years ago on the actors’ profiles that were publicly available in the UK, people put on mostly Spotlight, but there were other sites as well, where people would say, look, this is my professional CV. And they put their playing age, how old they think that they can play. And it’s usually about 10 years, right? And obviously it’s exactly what you think. The youngest people skew slightly older. As soon as you get to your mid-twenties, they’re honest. And then from then onwards, everyone thinks they can play someone 10 years younger than themselves. You should look at the graphs, they’re really fun.

But what’s interesting is I found that if you wanted to pick a female role that was like 26 or something, half of all the working actresses thought they could play that role. So you end up with an insurmountable number of people.

With Bond, it’s not like that. The criteria that I created with Bond was that I tried to intuit what made sense. So first of all, the producers have said that the character is male. The previous producers have said that, and also the public in large numbers have said they really wanted to be male.

from Stephen Follows

So without putting on a subjective judgment, I’ve said, okay, it’s male. So that halves the pool already. You’ve definitely got an age criteria. They have to be an adult, so you’re gonna put a low end on there. You’re also gonna put a high end because you don’t want them running around being very old because it might be hard for them to do the action stunts. They may not look convincing. Let’s say you’ve got a 15-year time horizon, which is what Daniel Craig looked at. I recently watched some of the old Roger Moore films, and he looks old in them, and he’s running around with younger women. It was weird then, and it was wrong then. It’s weirder and wronger now. And so that gives you a narrow time horizon.

Then finally, you definitely want someone who is a professional actor. They have to have been on set. You’re giving them the keys to one of the most valuable franchises in the world. I mean, Amazon paid a billion dollars for this, right? So you need someone who you can trust, who’s got the acting chops, who’s got the experience, and know they’re a professional actor. That cuts it down to about under 500 people straight away in the world that could do that.

There’s one more criteria, which is slightly more subjective, but I’ve taken their lead, which is that the character of Bond is British and is perhaps the definition of British suave. However, my personal opinion as a consumer is I don’t care where they’re from. Just convince me on screen, and I’m sold. However, there is a general consensus that they should probably be British or Irish, and so I included that in the criteria, which knocks out some of the Jacob Elordi people, or Glen Powell or someone like that.

But without that criteria, you’re under 500 people. Maybe 50 of them don’t want the job for various reasons. So could you, as a casting director, meet that many people? Yeah, probably. I mean, certainly you don’t have to, because you can watch their previous films and decide that they’re not a convincing actor or whatever it might be. Now you’re down to a very small number, and we haven’t even put any criteria about who they are. Are they attractive? Do they sell this? Do they sell that? This is just three or four criteria.

Yeah, again, I would encourage folks to watch the video, because it is a deeply, deeply fun approach that just like you take it very step-by-step. I think all of the assumptions that you make are done with the appropriate amount of generosity, done subjectively to the effect of “Listen, this is a product that they need to market.”

Again, I don’t think I agree with their decision that they couldn’t, say, take an Australian for the role, but then again Lazenby was Lazenby. End of the day, they’re called, and they get their list of who to call. But the video’s outstanding. Do you wanna talk a little bit about where you think some of this is gonna go? Maybe one of your favorite under-discussed Bonds?

We’ve got four criteria that I just mentioned there. So you’re looking for a man who’s British, British adjacent, in their 30s, who’s a working professional with some films behind them. That takes you down. Now you’re starting to do the artistic work of curation. Do you want someone attractive? Do you want them edgy? Do you want them to look unusual? Are they a character actor? Do we think of them as a convincing, charismatic person? Is Bond supposed to be like that?

If you look at the description of the character of Jack Reacher in the books, and then you look at Tom Cruise, they are not the same. If you look in Argo, at the end, there’s all these photos at the end of Argo, of the real person that person was portraying and the actor. And they are dead ringers, except for Ben Affleck.

And so you can see where power has changed. There’s physicality, there’s an intangible charisma and things like that. There’s also been quite hot button effort topics like race, for example. I mean, under half the population who was surveyed by the YouGov poll seem to be bothered whether Bond is white or not. Even the comments on my video show that there are people who do die on that hill. My personal opinion, that’s very disappointing and sad to see that in the world.

What’s the quote from Samuel Goldwyn from MGM? If you want to send a message, use Western Union.

With respect, I think that the organization that developed the concept of Amazon Basics is going to make a specific decision here, whether I agree with it or not. So your point is taken.

I remember when 12 Years a Slave was released in Italy, Brad Pitt was the person on the poster. Now that is because the belief is, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but black faces don’t sell as many tickets in Italy. And certainly people have said similar things about China. I’m not here to say that’s true or not. I’m here to say that those are the kinds of decisions that we hopefully, as humans, don’t have to make in our lives, but Amazon as an organization needs to consider. Anyway, so there’s that stuff.

There’s also the right amount of famous. They don’t want someone who’s more powerful than Amazon or Bond, because they’ve got to negotiate with them. They’re anointing this person, and then they want to control them. It’s not like the Pope where they anoint him and he’s omnipotent. It’s the opposite. They want to appoint a Pope and then control him like a puppet Pope. And puppet Pope’s not a thing. So that’s really, really tricky.

So I went through all this criteria and I created a scoring system that looked at all these different things. And let’s be honest, at this point, we’re definitely in the “isn’t this fun??” category. A real casting director does so much more than this. I can only measure what I can see. A lot of them are proxies for things. At the end of the day, it would take you about 10 seconds if you were a professional to watch someone acting and be like, yes, or no, maybe less, right? What’s the Malcolm Gladwell book? Blink. Almost all these experts, they just know because of their experience and data can’t even begin to touch that.

However, it doesn’t mean we can’t rank people. The current leading favorite, according to the bookies, is Callum Turner. Callum Turner, at the point I was writing it, he was like one to two, meaning that the general public and the betting companies believe that the news has leaked, it is him. We don’t know if that’s true or not, but that was what the prediction markets reflect, that the news has leaked. Now, it hasn’t been announced and there was an opportunity last week before last at CinemaCon and they didn’t take that. So who knows?

But I found him, he ranked 333rd out of about 500 people for me. He did not rank highly, partly because I wasn’t measuring the fact that he looks incredible. I mean, you look at him and you’re like, “Yeah, okay, I can see that.” But also they’re not measuring his acting ability and things like that. I put a pretty heavy age multiplier on it because I think age is really important. I think that if you get someone young enough to be convincing now, but you can live with them for the next 15, 20 years, that’s the best financial decision Amazon can make. So I decided that as you get closer and closer to 40 and 50, when the film would come out, the next film, I wanted to punish that more heavily because I think that’s a short-term goal and I don’t think Amazon makes short-term plays.

So that indexed a lot of the younger people. The person that came up best for me on my data was a 31-year-old called Tom Glynn Carney, who I recognised sort of, but I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of the lineup necessarily.

I know this dude from House of the Dragon, right?

Yes, I haven’t seen that, so that’s why.

I was thinking he’s excellent in it, yeah.

Well, I’m glad to hear that. I’m very good to hear. He came up very well and has got all of the bits on paper that I could measure and was very much the Broccoli-era Bond.

The producers of the original Bond, they sold it to Amazon. I know Amazon wants to do a whole different universe, the way that Disney changed Star Wars. They got rid of the extended universe and the old canon and created all these TV shows and adventure parks and stuff that weren’t there before. Maybe Amazon wants to do the same with a thousand TV series, spin-offs and adventure park. I don’t know. I think he’s good enough and experienced enough to be hired and be sold. I think he’s small enough and not famous enough that they can control him. I think it’d be great for him.

And Fionn Whitehead was very good. So was Joseph Quinn. was pretty impressed with Nabhaan Rizwan. He was fourth on my list, but he was the one I was most excited by. But there were others in there like Aaron Taylor Johnson, who would just be amazing, but a real tricky bet, very famous. It’s just what do you want your trouble to be? Do you want your trouble being selling this person in? Do you want your trouble being that they break the canon? Do you want their trouble to be that they’ve got more control than you want it to be? It depends what Amazon is in the mood for.

These are exciting problems and I look forward to how they prioritize the solution to them, I suppose.

And we don’t know the other half of this, right? Because let’s say that they have somebody in mind. All the data is great, they’ve watched all the person’s films and they’re like, they’re great. They walk in a room and they get the sense that they’re mad… I have met a lot of professional actors in my life and I can tell you, they over-index towards slightly mad. I don’t mind. As someone who’s neurodivergent, I do not mind being away from the mean, but I can tell you some actors are genuinely like, “Oh, I do not want to be in an elevator with you.” if they got that sense, they might be like, thanks for coming in. And then they turn to each other and say, “We are not putting that person behind the wheel”

“We’re not giving him a Walther PPK, I’ll tell you that much.”

There we go. That’s it. We’re not giving him our golden gun. We can’t ever measure that. We can’t ever know that. And as I said, I’m not gonna name any names, but I have worked with various people who I can see their public profile is slightly different to how they are in person. And if I was in charge of that and hiring them, I wouldn’t do that because of operational concerns, business continuity, however bland we want to put it.

So who knows?

I appreciate the attempt to try to dive into this Bond question just because it is such a fun one. And genuinely, is one of those once in a generation questions. You don’t get to do this speculation that often and we’re in that rare moment. So I would definitely encourage folks to check out the video.

Do you want to take a step back real quick and talk a little bit about where folks can find you and what irons in the fire you got right now? Because again, I really dig reading and watching you.

Well, I’ll give you a choose your own adventure. If you, there’s two options here. If you like your film stats done a bit dryly and a bit straightforward with a bit of pith and a bit of sass, but fundamentally just the facts, then go to stephenfollows.com. I publish two or three times a week. I study the film industry, both what’s on screen, but also behind the scenes. And I try to do a mix of content for data nerds, filmmakers, film fans. That might be everything from where films are made, how often Harvey Weinstein was thanked in the credits of the Oscars and the speeches of the Oscars, how long movies are, anything like this.

If you are just more wanting a bit of a journey, a bit of a mad cap journey through the film data world, then my new YouTube channel, The Film Data Scientist, is probably where to go. I promise you the math is just as rigorous, but it’s slightly more anarchic. And I make it with a good friend of mine called Ben, and we try and encourage each other to be as stupid as possible while keeping to the facts. And so yeah, subscribe there if you want to enjoy rather than think.

Amazing, all right. Well, hey, thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks, thanks for having me

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Edited by Crystal Wang