The big reason Jacob Elordi is wrong for Bond

Jacob Elordi as James Bond? Chop half a foot off him, then we’ll talk. The 28-year-old Australian star of Euphoria, Saltburn, Frankenstein and the current box-office smash Wuthering Heights is suddenly in the frame, albeit with his head poking awkwardly out the top of it.

Reportedly – which seems to be very reportedly – Elordi has “been in discussions” with Denis Villeneuve (confirmed as the director of Bond 26) about taking over the role, making him the new bookies’ favourite. Callum Turner has been knocked down to the No. 2 spot, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, once apparently “nailed on”, now languishes in third.

There are many ways that Elordi could be rather an intriguing Bond, but there’s one big problem: his wuthering height. At 6ft 5in, he’s much taller than any other 007 actor to date. We could gripe about his age, too – he’s even younger than fellow Aussie George Lazenby, who was 29 when he got his one and only call-up in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

But the height is the immutable deal-breaker. As soon as the rumours were floated, the memes started landing on social media. This super spy’s new nemesis? Low ceilings. His ability to slip in and out of crowds unnoticed? Only crowds of basketball players.

James Bond always gets a bespoke dinner suit, so that would be less of an issue. But watching him try to clamber in and out of an Aston Martin? Human origami isn’t what we’re after there.

Pairing him off romantically is a whole other problem. There’s been plenty of noise in the past about Elordi’s height differential with co-stars. It sort of works in Wuthering Heights because his take on Heathcliff is so feral and bedraggled, and Margot Robbie’s Cathy wants to be overpowered. Less so in Elordi’s trilogy of breakthrough rom-coms for Netflix, The Kissing Booth 1-3, where it was hard not to snigger at all the comical bending down.

The actor has since impugned these flicks as “ridiculous” and artistically beneath him. But isn’t just about everything beneath him? If the freshly minted Oscar nominee for Frankenstein sounds like a man with his head in the clouds, it is. When he sneezes, it’s the cirrus tickling.

Any time someone is floated as the next Bond – here we are again, on that seemingly unending merry-go-round – there’s a dreary obligation to dig out any old moth-eaten Ian Fleming paperback and see if the shoe fits. Seeing as Elordi’s shoe size is 14, the answer is probably no.

Should tallying up with Fleming’s description of Bond matter in the slightest, though? I’m in camp “nope”. The author has been dead for more than 60 years, and no one wants reverence to those novels in every other respect, or the films would be nasty, sexist and grim. For the record, Bond in Fleming is described as six feet tall with dark hair – so there goes Daniel Craig, the shortest Bond at five feet ten inches, on both counts. And yet, we survived.

Elordi, then, would not pose “authenticity” problems that don’t count, but production problems that do. Who would they cast opposite him? Gwendoline Christie from Game of Thrones? Bond needs to run fast and not look like a giraffe loping across savannahs. He needs to throw a punch and not swoosh through the air above enemies’ heads. We don’t really want to be reminded of Frankenstein’s Creature breaking heads on the ice floes, or of Heathcliff shovelling horse manure while stooping in a barn.

This is why I’d like to suggest that the media reporting on Elordi’s shot at Bond – based on sketchy intel about merely meeting Villeneuve – may have grasped entirely the wrong end of a very long stick. After all, the tallest actors in the James Bond films are not James Bond. Connery, Dalton and Lazenby were all around six feet two inches.

They are: the six feet five inch Christopher Lee. The six feet six inch Geoffrey Holder. And – twice – in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, the crick-your-neck-to-see-him Richard Kiel as Jaws. He towered over Roger Moore at seven feet, one and a half inches.

So it’s true that Elordi, with all his Byronic charisma, his remarkable cheekbones, his very evident acting talents and the huge fanbase he would bring along, would be a fabulous asset to the Villeneuve Bond reboot. As the villain.

If that was agreed, you’d hear a giant sigh of relief from whichever actor of less freakish stature – I’m pro Turner – they decide to cast as Bond. Not that the pressure would be off entirely, but that’s quite a pair of shoulders to share the load with.

Tim Robey is a long-time film critic for the London Telegraph.