Inside ‘Once Upon A Spy’, Peter Morgan’s Abandoned Bond 23 Script Treatment
Before Skyfall hit theaters and became the first billion-dollar Bond film, Peter Morgan, the man behind The Crown, co-wrote “a shocking story” for Bond 23 with prolific Bond screenwriters Robert Wade and Neal Purvis.
While the scriptment isn’t available for public consumption, the basic story idea is outlined in the Bond book, Some Kind of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films by Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury.
Entitled Once Upon A Spy, the script treatment begins in flashback with a British agent named Catherine Mansfield stationed in Berlin. She’s having an affair with another agent, who turns out to be a double agent working for the KGB with serious repercussions for her in the present.
The idea doesn’t seem so shocking until you realize that Mansfield is the real name of Judi Dench’s M in the Daniel Craig films. Apparently, actress Carey Mulligan was tapped to play the young M in flashback.
The flashback would likely have been the precredit sequence for Bond 23, with the story picking up 30 years later, in the present day, after the opening credits.
M’s past affair comes back to haunt her after the KGB agent dies, and his son, a Russian oligarch, uses information about their relationship to blackmail her.
M sends 007 to make a payoff, but it all goes wrong and in a shocking twist Bond is forced to kill M.
There’s no information on why Bond kills M, though it suggests she turns out to be a traitor.
Director Sam Mendes and the film’s producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson rejected the idea, and Peter Morgan left the project.
“Neal [Purvis] and I are pretty well steeped in Fleming. I think Peter was more interested in [John] Le Carré. It just didn’t work,” Wade told Digital Spy. “We always found [the script treatment] really, really difficult to make credible or satisfying. It was very dark … The only thing that remained was that M’s past comes back to haunt her and she dies at the end.”
Purvis and Wade wrote a first draft for Skyfall, then called Nothing Is Forever, and kept two central ideas from Once Upon A Spy.
The idea of a mistake from M’s past catching up with her and leading to her death remains the central storyline. Rather than turn M into a traitor, as in Once Upon A Spy, M is killed by a disgruntled former agent she gave up to the Chinese in exchange for a peaceful transition during the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.
In the draft for Nothing Is Forever, the film’s villain is named Raoul Sousa (later changed to Raoul Silva in Skyfall). Sousa bombs a Barcelona subway which leads to M being killed in an MI6 safe house. Once Oscar-nominated writer John Logan came on board, the story was fine-tuned. Instead of a subway in Barcelona, Silva bombs MI6 and the safe house is replaced with Bond’s childhood home, Skyfall.
M dies from gunshot wounds, but only after Bond kills Silva. Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) succeeds Mansfield to become the new M.
The idea of turning M into a traitor hasn’t completely disappeared. The idea was floated for Skyfall’s follow-up, SPECTRE. Originally, Mallory was going to sell out to Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) but Ralph Fiennes protested.
In an interview on The Happy Sad Podcast, the British actor recalled telling Mendes he didn’t want to come onboard to play the iconic MI6 chief only for him to turn evil.
“M is never the bad guy,” Fiennes told the director.
Mendes listened, and Purvis and Wade created new character, C, the Head of the Joint Intelligence Service (JIS). Played by Andrew Scott, C is a “cocky little shit” who has no qualms about handing over control of Britain’s surveillance to Blofeld and SPECTRE.
Mallory still makes dubious decisions in No Time To Die. In Craig’s final Bond film, Mallory’s short-sighted perspective about his off-the-books project Herakles leads to considerable strife. The DNA-targeting weapon is meant to reduce collateral damage by targeting individuals precisely without harming those around them. However, Mallory can’t see that the weapon can be altered to kill whole families and even entire ethnic groups that share similar genetics.
Bond has to help M out of this mess, something that he does with more success in No Time to Die than in the scriptment for Once Upon A Spy.
Eon has canned the idea of a treacherous M for the time being. But in the grey world of espionage, many top spies and spymasters have turned on their countries. So this idea could appear in a future Bond film.
