Hello, everyone, and welcome to Slash Film Weekly. It's Wednesday, October 1st, 2025. On today's episode of the show, we're going to be talking about the latest film and TV news. We'll discuss one of the most anticipated movies of the year, Paul Thomas Anderson's one battle after another, and we'll present interviews with that movie's stars. My name is Ben Pearson. I'm an editor at Slashfilm.com, and joining me now is Slashfilm editor, Paul. Hello, hello. All right, Jacob, as listeners are listening to this, as this episode is being published, I'm out of the country. So we're recording this pretty early. And so we're not really going to get into the latest movie news, but there is one piece of news that I think you and I are qualified to talk about, which is, as James Bond

fans, we must have opinions on this news that apparently, Denisville Nouve is directing

the new Bond movie, is going to be looking for an unknown British actor for his film,

James Bond 26, whatever it ends up being called.

The latest report from Deadline says that he's going to be starting the casting process

after he completes production on Dune Part 3.

What's your gut reaction to this?

I think this is the way to go.

I mean, they have cast James Bond actors before who were stars. I mean, Roger Moore was

actually a big TV star when he was cast as James Bond. But Sean Connery was not a well-known

bankable leading man. Daniel Craig was, you know, probably best known, you know, he had led Layercake

that was not a widely seen movie. He was probably best known for being like six build and road to perdition for American audiences.

James Bond character carries so much baggage that an actor bringing their additional baggage to it doesn't feel like the right choice right now.

I mean, you want an actor who is going to really be able to merge with a character

without people thinking about their past work.

I mean,

it's just too big of a character to bring in somebody who already exists

in the public consciousness,

in my opinion.

Does that make sense, Ben?

Yeah, it absolutely does. There are all these, like, ridiculous rumors about Timothy Shalame and Glenn Powell and

people like that, you know, being tossed into consideration here. I saw, I think we talked about

...