Gary Oldman’s Sorry You Thought He Knew the Next James Bond

It was earlier this week that Gary Oldman dropped a little hint that he knew the actor who’d be next in line to play James Bond. That read to many as an implication that his Slow Horses costar Jack Lowden landed the gig, but now the former Winston Churchill’s popped back in to basically say “whoops.”

At a recent TIFF Visionaries session, the actor amended that he doesn’t actually know who’ll be the next Bond. Asked by host Josh Horowitz if he’d introduce Lowden as the next 007, Oldman said the press has taken things to the “very edge of almost misquoting me, but they don’t. […] A Canadian journalist asked me about Bond and Jack Lowden. I didn’t bring it up, she brought it up, I didn’t volunteer this.” He stood by his initial comment of hearing an actor had been picked among the shortlist, and that he was still “fingers crossed for my man Jack. That was it.”

Gary setting the record straight on the Bond speculation 🙂‍↕️ pic.twitter.com/aXTGtZPbrq

Among the crowd’s laughter, Oldman joked that he knows who got picked because he’s got an in with the Bond team, before emphatically stating: “I do not know who the next James Bond is.” If it seems like he’s doing a bit much, it’s because he recalled when he got “reprimanded” for offhandedly telling press a third Batman movie was coming post- The Dark Knight . He’d very much like to not get in “a lot of shit” a second time—so whoever it ends up being, we won’t be getting that info from Oldman’s mouth.

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