Appearing on “The Tonight Show,” (via The Hollywood Reporter) Brian Cox spoke about when he received the call to host the new show, revealing that he initially thought his time to co-star in a Bond film had come. He said:
“It was called ‘007: Road to a Million.’ I thought it was the new James Bond film. So I said, ‘Oh, finally they’re getting me in a James Bond movie.’ I thought, ‘yes, of course. Don’t even show me the script.'”
What’s that, Brian? You didn’t know right away that you were being asked to front a reality show tangentially related to the Bond franchise where you’d be wandering around a dingy control room handing out sadistic challenges to the great British public? Shocking.
Poor old Cox must have been a bit deflated when he learned the truth about what he was being asked to do. As the 77-year-old told Jimmy Fallon, “For years I thought, ‘Yeah, I’d love to be a James Bond villain. It’d be really interesting.’ And I thought, ‘This is my moment.’ But it wasn’t.”
Still, the veteran star obviously agreed to do it and seems to have enjoyed himself, claiming that doing the show was “great fun,” and adding, “I love bossing people around. So that’s what I did, you know. I bossed all these people around.”