According to the film’s director, Spectre villain Christoph Waltz was originally going to take a backseat to a different evil mastermind.
Caution: Spoiler alerts for Spectre ahead.
In Spectre, Christoph Waltz plays the shadowy supervillain Franz Oberhauser, who is really the less shadowy but equally supervillain-y Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
However, he wasn’t always the head honcho. Radio Times reports that early drafts of the film’s script had the vision of Andrew Scott’s Max Denbigh being the true villain behind the evil plot.
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Scott’s character, codenamed C, is the head of the Centre of Intelligence, which is the driving organizational force behind the merge of MI6 and MI5. His ultimate institutional goal is to introduce Nine Eyes, a surveillance program with the combined force of nine countries that would effectively end the 00-program.
However, Denbigh is also a SPECTRE agent, and the Nine Eyes program also gives SPECTRE unfiltered access to global surveillance.
In the final film, Denbigh works under Blofeld, but originally he was meant to be the evil genius behind the whole plan.
To me, this makes very little sense.
Blofeld is the James Bond villain. He is Bond’s main rival throughout the series. What good would introducing him in this prequel be if he wasn’t the main baddie? No Bond film has ever placed Blofeld below Number One.
Even if switching the hierarchy wasn’t Bond-villain blasphemy, what would this mean for Waltz? He already has a cursory role in the film, at best. The film is two and a half hours long, and he has at most 30 minutes of screen time. His henchman Hinx gets more screen time than he does, and the man doesn’t even speak.
The creative team of Spectre definitely realized that giving Blofeld even more of a backseat would be problematic. If only they would have let Waltz do more than sit in a chair and prick Bond with a needle.
Next: Who Should Be the Next Bond Director: Martin Campbell
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