A Stunt From 1962's Dr. No Almost Decapitated Sean Connery
Fictional secret agent James Bond has gotten into his fair share of scrapes and close calls, but broadly speaking, the high-profile actors who have played him on screen have been pretty safe stepping into the character's expensive shoes. The Bond films have become famous for their jaw-dropping and boundary-pushing stunts, but those moments are the result of teams of people who design and choreograph everything to be as safe as possible for both the stars and their stunt doubles. (There's still no Academy Award for stunts yet, huh? OK then.) The James Bond franchise is one of the most lucrative and longest-running film series of all time, but in its very first movie, we nearly lost its first lead actor in a gruesome death that would have robbed movie lovers of some legendary performances and ripped away the franchise's potential before it even got started.
In 1962's "Dr. No," Sean Connery's Bond notices he's being tailed by three assassins while driving up a mountain road. A car chase ensues, and at one point, 007 drives underneath an outstretched crane that's blocking the road, barely making it and thwarting his enemies, who crash off the side of the mountain. Sean Connery wanted to do the stunt driving himself, and tragedy almost struck.
"He's very lucky to be alive," director Terence Young said years later in a Rolling Stone profile of Connery. "We damn near killed him. When we rehearsed it, he drove about five or ten miles an hour, just to see if he could go under it, and he cleared it by about four inches. But as we were shooting it, he was coming at forty, fifty miles an hour — and he suddenly realized the car was bouncing two feet up in the air, and there he was with his head sticking out. It so happened that the last bounce came just before he reached the thing and he went down and under — or he would've been killed."
You can see the stunt in question at about the 1:15 mark in the video below.
This James Bond stunt nearly went very wrong
It appears as if the final version of the stunt that made it into the movie was accomplished using rear projection, so I wonder if the take where Connery did it for real was somehow ruined because of how close he came to dying.
And spare a moment to consider the gigantic ripple effects this death could have caused. Obviously, there are the emotional consequences of losing a promising young actor whose career was just leveling into superstar status, and the unpleasant shadow that would have cast over any future Bond films that were made (if any were ever attempted again after such a nasty incident). The Bond movies were inextricable from the swingin' '60s of London, and excising it from the equation could have had massive societal ramifications.
From an entertainment industry perspective, if Connery had died in that car, James Bond may never have made such a huge impact on pop culture and influenced entire generations who grew up with them — including Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, whose attempt to make their own Bond movie resulted in the birth of the Indiana Jones franchise. And the loss of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" would subsequently have impacted the video game world, too: Without Indy, there's probably no "Tomb Raider" or "Uncharted."
As for Sean Connery as an actor, movies like "Zardoz," "Highlander," "The Untouchables," "The Hunt for Red October," and "The Rock" would have greatly suffered without his singular presence. He was a complicated, deeply flawed man whose off-screen behavior sometimes left a lot to be desired, but hot damn, Sean Connery was one hell of a movie star. I'm thankful we got to live in a reality in which he left his indelible mark on the world of cinema.