The Best James Bond Ever, According To One Former 007 Actor

When it comes to the best James Bond movie, the clear winner is 2006's "Casino Royale." But there simply is no answer to the question "Who was the best James Bond?" The best James Bond is whichever James Bond you grew up with, or whichever actor spoke to your specific sensibility. Of course, there's always the option of asking 007 himself, and according to Timothy Dalton, Daniel Craig is the undisputed champ.

Dalton, who portrayed England's greatest spy in 1987's "License to Kill" and 1989's "The Living Daylights," was evidently highly impressed by Craig's portrayal of the same character. In a 2012 Los Angeles Times interview, the former Bond said, "There's a case to be made that Daniel Craig is the best Bond ever, or at least in a very long time." 

You certainly could have made that case in 2012. Craig was coming off "Skyfall," a film inexplicably hailed as one of the greatest 007 entries ever. Despite being a betrayal of the two movies that preceded it, the general consensus is that Sam Mendes' 2012 Bond effort restored the franchise to greatness, transforming Bond for a new generation and melding the old with the new to create something fresh and original. As such, Dalton was likely influenced in his opinion by the film's success at the time — though, based solely on Craig's performance in the aforementioned "Casino Royale," he might have had a point.

But Dalton didn't stop there. It seems the ex-Bond star had some opinions on other actors to have donned the tux, and not all of them were quite as positive as his take on Craig.

In his LA Times interview, Timothy Dalton was perhaps a little more candid than he intended when he dubbed Roger Moore's portrayal of James Bond a "pastiche that almost became a parody at the end." Of course, Moore was well aware that his take on 007 was much more lighthearted than his predecessor's. He'd also tried to go darker with his portrayal at a time when Moore was still figuring out how to separate his James Bond from Sean Connery's version. But the darker Bond never really worked for him, pushing him further towards a more tongue-in-cheek iteration. It proved successful ... until it didn't. Rather than devolving into pastiche, Moore's Bond performance just became downright weird when an almost sexagenarian 007 was bedding 30-something Bond Girls.

Meanwhile, Dalton was taking Pierce Brosnan to task. "I think he wanted to go darker and deeper," he told the Times, "but that wasn't what those movies were." He was probably right there. Brosnan's Bond often seemed a little too cold-hearted, even while the movies around him were proudly showcasing ice palaces and invisible cars. Still, "GoldenEye" remains an essential Bond movie that everyone should see. Based solely on that, you couldn't really begrudge anybody arguing for Brosnan as the best 007 if they happened to grow up watching him face off against Alec Trevelyan and spending hours in the N64 game.

Unfortunately, Dalton's favorite, Daniel Craig, ultimately found himself in increasingly terrible Bond films that would have undermined his standing as one of the great 007 actors if "Casino Royale" wasn't so damn good. Otherwise, it remains unclear where Dalton would rank his own portrayal.