Jeffrey Wright is having a stellar 2021 so far, lending his talents to a huge number of projects across the film, television and even audio worlds. On the big screen, he finally wrapped his role as Jim Gordon in The Batman earlier this year, and he’ll shortly be seen in cinemas when Wes Anderson’s potential awards season contender The French Dispatch releases in just a couple of weeks.
On top of that, he won a whole new legion of fans as the Watcher in Marvel Cinematic Universe animated series What If…?, voices the Caped Crusader in HBO Max’s Batman: The Audio Adventures and recently began shooting Season 4 of sci-fi hit Westworld.
Wright is also back as Felix Leiter in No Time to Die, and in a new interview with Uproxx, he revealed that he was grateful to be invited back having been left on the sidelines since Quantum of Solace.
“Every time it was time for another of the Bonds to go into production, I was texting Barbara Broccoli going, ‘Hey, where’s Felix in all of this?’. She would reach out and say, ‘Felix is in this one’. And then three weeks later, ‘Well, he’s not in this one.’ So they kind of keep me on my toes with these things. But, yeah, I was certainly excited to hear that he would be back. And it felt, just for Felix, if this is going to be Daniel’s last, for Felix to make another visit onto the scene and kind of round out these chapters in the franchise’s history. So I’m very grateful that, at the end of the day, that’s how it played out. And I was able to kind of complete the circle of my relationship.”
Fans had always supported the notion of Wright becoming a regular fixture of Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond, but a 60% success rate isn’t too bad all things considered. Only in the last two installments has the current iteration of 007 really relied on recurring favorites like Ralph Fiennes’ M, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny, Christoph Waltz’s Blofeld and Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann, so it made sense for the secret agent’s old CIA cohort to make his long-awaited comeback in No Time to Die, thirteen years on from his last appearance.