“No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be spaghettified by a black hole!”
The Telegraph is reporting (from an interview in this month’s WIRED magazine) that Professor Stephen Hawking thinks that a James Bond film could use a real mad scientist — namely himself.
“My idea [sic] role would be a baddie in a James Bond film. I think the wheelchair and the computer voice would fit the part,†he says in WIRED.
Hawking has been in The Simpsons, Star Trek, and is now the subject of a Oscar-worthy biopic The Theory of Everything, so additional screen-time isn’t that far-fetched for the world-renowned physicist. But would he make a good Bond villain? Well, he might be able to come up with some particularly dastardly plans.
Stephen Hawking is best known to the public for his work on black holes — what makes them up, how they move, and how they die. “Hawking Radiation,” as it has come to be known, theoretically established that spinning black holes actually do let some particles escape as they gobble up all matter and light around them. They eventually lose enough mass to “evaporate” and blink out of existence.
Would a villain with such knowledge make a good adversary for Bond? Hawking — eccentric, witty, and somewhat mysterious — certainly would have that almost campy Bond villain feel. I can see the scientist crafting a device that would create a mini black hole here on Earth, with only Daniel Craig to stop it with some combination of sex, martinis, and a Walther PPK. Or maybe Hawking could unleash an unstoppable, self-replicating artificial intelligence (as he is apparently terrified of) that would force MI6 to go all Skyfall again. But if we are talking about making real-world geniuses into Bond baddies, my vote would have to be for the Musk.
Still, I’d pay to hear Hawking say anything sinister in that trademark synthesized voice.
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What do you think, would Hawking make a good Bond adversary?
I am sure he will be a good villain and he will win.
I think if Stephen Hawking became a Bond Villain, he’d probably win, and there wouldn’t be anymore Bond films!
Once you black…you gon get a wheel chair.
wtf I thought he was already a bond villian, he better stop talking shit about A.I. or he’s gonna be the first casualty when the sexy robots take over
I think he should be in an movie as a villain but outside of the James Bond franchise, because it may be difficult to account for a real physicist in James Bond imaginative world. But then again, if anyone is enough of a substantial icon that has the tools to create chaos locked in his brain. The computer could eventually start fighting again him and he becomes fragile and vulnerable and we feel for him as we feel for the Glass Man in that one movie. This would be a good next step in the ALS Awareness Years (until a cure is found). And as he’s laying on a bed while technology controls his environment, misinterpreting his thoughts as his translation-software gets more advances. And the Black Holes. Just I twitch, I think, no Football, just utter chaos and independent motion stops. Then maybe he can do something to save everyone. Every single one.
Would be particularly awesome to have 007 pursue Elon Musk developing some nightmarish weapon, only to succeed, destroy the weapon, and only then find out it was a weapon meant to defend the entire earth from the mysterious Dr Hawking, the real villain, who is about to release a human sterility virus or self-replicating nanobot whose sole purpose is to disassemble synthetic compounds on the molecular level in a global do-over. Bond stops him, but not without realizing that in doing so, we’re making a conscious decision to run our species off the rails headlong into whatever natural consequences await us, revealing Bond, governments, society, & socially acceptable popular opinion to be a far crazier and destructive villain than The Hawk.