James Norton for Bond: The list of contenders keeps growing

The cut-glass cheekbones, the sharp dinner jackets, the exotic locations: it’s no surprise that James Norton’s role in McMafia, BBC One’s silky new crime drama, has seen him installed this week as the hot favourite to replace Daniel Craig as James Bond.

But while critics call it Norton’s big audition and Twitter hyperventilates, fawning over his bare-chested beach scene, remember we’ve been in this exact spot before, in 2016, when a preening Tom Hiddleston caught the eye as a debonair spy in the not-too-dissimilar-to-McMafia thriller The Night Manager.

After Craig had seemed to announce his retirement from Bond duty with his comment that he would rather slash his own wrists than play the secret agent again, Hiddleston was considered a shoo-in: at one point, betting was even suspended on him taking the role. But then he began a publicity-ravenous relationship with Taylor Swift, which stripped him of any veneer of cool and unobtainability — essential 007 traits — while Bond supremo Barbara Broccoli allegedly deemed him too “smug and not tough enough” to play the world’s most famous spy.

Which brings us to Norton. According to Diane Keaton, his co-star in last year’s comedy Hampstead, the 32-year-old “ticks every box”. “He’s beautiful, he’s a man, he’s sexy, he is smart and he went to Cambridge,” she gushed.

Far be it from anyone to disagree entirely with Hollywood royalty, but I can’t help thinking Norton would be a poor choice to succeed Craig after the latter’s 2019 swansong. His performance in McMafia offers evidence as to why.

As Alex Godman, the England-educated scion of a Russian mafia family, he is a charisma vacuum, a suit-wearing cipher imprisoned in a plot that thinks it’s far smarter than it is.

Besides, he doesn’t have the star wattage just yet to carry a massive global franchise. Someone like Tom Hardy, however, does — and would provide a fresh, much-needed fillip to a series that is fast-becoming stale, with Craig now looking weary.

Boosting his credentials further still is the fact that he was a revelation in last year’s Beauty and the Beast as the odious Gaston: a paragon of vanity and virility, vacillating neatly between macho and camp.

At 38, Evans also has age on his side. But are the producers brave enough to cast an openly gay actor? Another equally compelling candidate is David Oyelowo.

A thespian of serious clout, the 41-year-old was the first black actor to play an English king in a major Shakespeare production when he starred as Henry VI for the RSC, and it’s mystifying to this day why he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for his electrifying performance as Martin Luther King in Selma. Plus, he’s also brought gravitas to the role of Bond before — albeit on an audiobook of Trigger Mortis, the 2015 “official Bond” novel by Anthony Horowitz continuing the franchise. As with Hardy, Hiddleston and Norton, though, Oyelowo went to boarding school, which doesn’t bode well.

Despite 007 himself having attended Eton (followed by Fettes), all previous Bond actors, bar Timothy Dalton, have come from working-class backgrounds.

“I wanted a ballsy guy... put a bit of veneer over that tough Scottish hide and you’ve got Fleming’s Bond,” Cubby Broccoli once said of Connery’s portrayal. That toughness is as essential to the part now as it was then.