5. Mel Gibson
Year Considered: 1987
Reason He Didn't Get The Role: Being Australian (And Too Short) You know Mel Gibson nowadays for his awkwardly racist rants and flailing Hollywood career, but cast your mind back to the late '80s when this guy was taking Hollywood by storm and it's perhaps far easier to imagine him in Bond's shiny and incredibly well-fitting shoes. Yes, MGM themselves wanted to get Gibson into that tuxedo, presumably just to see what it looked like, but Albert Broccoli didn't like the fact that Gibson was both Australian and "too short," and eventually withdraw his name for consideration. I can't decide whether or not ol' Mel would have slipped into Bond's persona well enough or not, but it's probably a good thing that he didn't, given that he's not really a man of the accent. And by that, I mean that he's terrible at doing accents - the last thing we needed were five films with Mel Gibson channelling Don Cheadle in the
Ocean's movies. Not that Bond was cockney. But was Don Cheadle supposed to be cockney? The big question we should be asking here, then, is... what is going on with Don Cheadle's accent in the
Ocean's movies?