Ralph Fiennes Says Sam Mendes Wanted to Turn M Into a Villain in Spectre

If this was the case, the last two Daniel Craig Bond films would have looked a lot different.

james-bond-ralph-fiennes-social-featured — Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

The end of Daniel Craig’s era as James Bond is officially over with No Time to Die finally coming out earlier this year. The film saw Craig’s 007 cleaning up Ralph Fiennes’ M’s mess and stopping Rami Malek’s Safin from using a nano-bot virus to wipe out the majority of Earth’s population. However, it seems like No Time to Die would have turned out a lot differently if director Sam Mendes had his way with Spectre. In a recent interview with Josh Horowitz on his podcast Happy Sad Confused, Fiennes revealed some rather surprising details about how Mendes wanted to turn M into a villain.

While reflecting on his time on the franchise Fiennes said:

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I think I can say now that I had to fight off an attempt by Sam in ‘Spectre’ to make M – I said ‘I don’t want to play M and then you turn around and make him the bad guy. M is never the bad guy.’ So I had to have some pretty intense discussions with Sam saying, ‘This is not flying with me…’

Christoph Waltz in Spectre — Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

The conversation would go on with Horowitz specifically asking if M would have been working for Blofeld, to which Fiennes replied, “He was Blofeld or something, but that was a red line.” As fans will remember Blofeld turned out to be played by Christoph Waltz and he had a mole in MI6 in Andrew Scott’s C. The interview made it sound like it was all water under the bridge, but nevertheless, it is fun to theorize what would have happened if M was revealed to be a villain. There are a lot of fascinating places to take that concept, but in this specific instance, it would have undermined a lot of M’s story arc from Skyfall.

When Spectre came out in 2015, many fans criticized the film for the Blofeld twist and how the iconic villain was technically related to James Bond, while also being behind everything in the Craig series up to that point. While the idea of an evil M would be a compelling avenue to take, the legacy of the character might stop that from happening in the future. We do not know how far in development this idea was, but thinking about how this one narrative choice could have affected Craig’s final two Bond outings is interesting to say the least and this would have definitely made Bond’s trust issues even worse.