Poor Timothy Dalton always gets overlooked when it comes to debating the best James Bond to have ever donned a tuxedo, necked a shaken-not-stirred martini, gotten the girl, and saved the world. The actor wasn’t even the first choice to lead The Living Daylights, with eventual 007 Pierce Brosnan unable to get out of his contract for TV show Remington Steele, but the Dalton duology have always been sorely underrated installments.
After the high camp and rising cheese factor of the Roger Moore era, Dalton’s Bond was ahead of his time. He was damaged, bitter and always carried a hint of danger, but having a brief two-film stint as the iconic secret agent didn’t give the actor enough of an opportunity to show what he could really do.
Clearly, longtime fans haven’t forgotten after a new study named Dalton as the best James Bond ever, with online casino company Casumo crunching the numbers, as per ScreenRant. In a fairly straightforward method of determining a winner, IMDb user ratings were calculated and then divided by the number of movies the star in question headlined, with Dalton’s 7.3 putting him at the head of the pack.
That’s just ahead of Daniel Craig’s 7.2, Sean Connery’s 6.9, with Brosnan and Moore tied on 6.6, and poor George Lazenby left on the outside looking in once again on a 6.1. The debate about who can be deemed the superior 007 will rage eternally, but it’s nice to see Timothy Dalton getting some well-deserved appreciation.
