Aaron Taylor-Johnson is being tipped as the new 007, a casting that would make him the first Jew to play the action hero.

The British actor has emerged as the frontrunner to replace Daniel Craig in the canonical James Bond movie brand following a secret audition with producer Barbara Broccoli. It has been reported that the meeting went so well, Taylor-Johnson filmed a version of the iconic gun-barrel teaser, which opens every Bond movie.

Since apparently killing Craig’s Bond in No Time to Die, producers have been planning to take the spy thriller franchise in a new direction, which makes the 32-year-old Taylor-Johnson an obvious contender. His relative youth means they will be able to get four or five films made with him.

Broccoli was said to be particularly impressed by Taylor-Johnson in the 2015 American superhero film Avengers: Age of Ultron and last year’s fast-paced comedy Bullet Train. She will also be impressed that he won a Golden Globe and Bafta nomination for his role in Nocturnal Animals.

Aaron Taylor Johnson GettyImages-1415706268

Taylor-Johnson (Getty Images)

Born Aaron Perry Johnson in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, his mother Sarah is Jewish with Russian ancestry. He first found fame playing a teenaged John Lennon in the 2009 biographical film Nowhere Boy, directed by Sam Taylor-Wood who is now his wife.

Despite a 23-year age difference, the couple married in 2012, and have two daughters.
There has always been a Jewish element to Bond — even if its writer Ian Fleming was not, it seems, always a fan of the Jews. Goldfinger, one of the franchise’s most iconic baddies was named after the Hungarian architect and Fleming’s Hampstead neighbour, Erno Goldfinger.

After Goldfinger, the seventh novel in the Bond series, came out, the designer threatened to sue him.

Meanwhile, the Jewish producer Harry Saltzman optioned the rights to make the first Bond film, Dr No, with Jewish screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz, and the Jewish playwright Richard Maibaum adapted Fleming’s 007 novels into the first Bond screenplay.

And another Jew Sir Kenneth Adams, born in Berlin in 1921, did the set designs for the Bond films of the 1960s and 1970s, winning two Academy Awards for his work. The iconic Bond baddy lair is thanks to his art direction.