#bondiana

His emotional range is close to zero. Bond is not easily impressed. How many times he almost died, and yet he always carries on as if nothing happened. Might also add his unbelievable pain tolerance to the list.

Bond is a high-class liar and uses it to his advantage. His conscience lets everything slide.

He's not empathetic. At all. He's spared people in the movies, but it had nothing to do with mercy. Just raw rationality.

Bond doesn't listen to anyone but himself. So many times he dodged MI6 orders to have things his way, often reckless and too violent. Thanks to him being a main character, his plans always work, and it feeds his huge ego.

Despite everything, Bond blends in very well with other people and you wouldn't know there's something wrong with him unless you get to know him better (and that's luxury that very few people can afford). His egocentrism makes him stand out, but no one really cares because he's got charisma and charm on his side.

Bond can't have healthy relationship with women and uses them either as sexual objects or sources of information. His partners change in a snap of a finger. Even if he can experience attachment, it's purely platonic. The closest he ever got to love was when he met Vesper, but Bond doesn't love her per se because he's not able to do that. She was his best friend, the person who understood Bond better than anyone else. Sadly or not, Vesper saw what they had as true feelings. Not sure they would make a functional family.

Bond is also attached to M, but, unlike Vesper, it has nothing to do with her as a person. M symbolizes his life duty, his service to the United Kingdom. Bond lives for that only, and he would fight for his principles until the end, so naturally, he would fight for M. People say she was a mother figure to him, and I don't think it contradicts my point. It's his motherland he's protecting, right?

RAMI MALEK - BOND 25

EXCLUSIVE: French-born Sebastien Soudais, 36, ­says he immersed himself in the new spy film so much he 'erased' his own personality

In an exclusive interview Sebastien said: “I’ve had to erase my own personality and become Rami. He is a big part of the movie so I’m on screen for quite a lot.

“The two of us worked together before shooting started. I had to learn all about his body, gestures, movement, attitude, get inside his head, mimic him in every way and fully understand how he functions.

“I have become Rami Malek. I spent weeks in London working with his movement coach Polly Bennett.

“I practised in the street, in my bathroom and sent videos of me “being” Rami to him and Polly to give me feedback. Rami’s a very generous man and helped me a lot.

“You have to erase your own personality, the way you move and walk, and become someone else. I had to match Rami perfectly – height, size, chest, back.”

Had to give a public talk about James Bond (at the closing of a “Bond at 50” exhibit co-organized by GQ), so I talked about Bondiana and its on-and-off relationship with camp. It went over pretty well, actually! Here are some quick notes from it, just in case.

The main thesis is that all Bonds, after rebooting with a different actor, start out more earnest than we tend to remember, and lapse farther and farther into camp as they go along. The most jarring example is, of course, the somber From Russia with Love (1963), whose entire plot is “Bond has to steal a decoding gizmo from the Soviets,” followed directly by the crazed nuclear swing of Goldfinger (1964); but each sub-series goes through a similar cycle. The seeming exception is Timothy Dalton, but his two films actually prove the rule: The Living Daylights, campy as a glitter bomb, came from a script intended for the previous Bond, Roger Moore, and License to Kill was the actual, if failed, reboot.