20 Things You Didn’t Know About GoldenEye (1995)

Alec Trevelyan was named after John Trevelyan, who was the Secretary of the Board of the British Board of Film Classification from 1958 until 1971, after which he retired because he was concerned that films were becoming too mindlessly violent.

Trevelyan gave the Bond franchise a hard time in the 1960s as he disliked Double-0 Seven’s inherent sadism, particularly in the quips that he gave after dispatching his adversaries.

The onscreen Trevelyan was originally intended to be an older character, Augustus Trevelyan, who was James Bond’s mentor. The filmmakers had hoped to cast Sir Anthony Hopkins in the role and, when he declined, they approached Alan Rickman, who also turned the part down because he was tired of playing villains.

The casting net then opened to consider younger actors and, when Sean Bean - a contender for the role of James Bond in The Living Daylights - auditioned, Trevelyan was reimagined as Double-0 Seven’s friend, colleague, and contemporary, who ultimately betrays him.

This created a complication around Alec Trevelyan’s age: whereas Augustus would have been able to remember the ignominy of his Lienz Cossack parents being forced to return to Soviet Russia by the British, where Joseph Stalin summarily executed them, Alec’s parents escaped the executions and killed themselves after he was born.