The film and its title character may bring to mind the
fencing instructor played by Madonna in her Die Another Day cameo, at
least for us 007 fans. But Verity is actually the film adaptation of
Colleen Hoover’s 2018 bestselling novel. I certainly recommend it to anyone
considering venturing into book writing, as I did seven years ago with my James
Bond essays and, this year, with my own leap into fiction through The Power of Having You Near. The
premise is somewhat open-ended, leaving the audience with two possible
interpretations of what they have seen. However, based on the film (I haven’t
read the novel), I have to say that something about the dynamics between its
three main characters, played by Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh
Hartnett, reminded me of the circumstances surrounding Pierce Brosnan’s
departure from the role of James Bond in 2004.
Below this photo of Die Another Day’s Verity comes a brief summary containing MAJOR SPOILERS. If you haven’t watched the Michael Showalter film, I recommend stopping here.
Verity follows Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a relatively unknown novelist
who receives an offer from Hachette to ghostwrite for bestselling crime author
Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) and complete her unfinished novel. It turns out that Verity has
suffered an accident and is now in a catatonic state. She can neither move nor
speak and will likely spend the rest of her days in a wheelchair. Lowen is
initially reluctant to accept the offer, but Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Harnett),
convinces her by claiming that his wife specifically requested her for the job.
Lowen moves to the Crawford estate in snowy Vermont to get the work done. While
going through Verity’s files, she comes across the manuscript of an
autobiography entitled So Be It, in
which the novelist claims to have intensely disliked her children and confesses
to having caused her daughter Harper’s drowning by deliberately capsizing her
canoe while they were paddling across a lake, saving only her son, Crew. Lowen
is horrified by what she has read. As she begins a flirtatious relationship
with Jeremy, she also starts to suspect that Verity may be faking her
disability, having caught glimpses of her walking when nobody else was around.
So, how does everything turn out? As Lowen and Jeremy’s
romance develops (he even admits that it was he, not Verity, who chose her to
finish the book), the ghostwriter finds time to talk to Crew, who inadvertently
tells her that his mother had warned him not to speak to her. The boy
subsequently has a domestic accident, prompting Jeremy to take him to the
doctor. Lowen and Verity are left alone at the estate, and the ghostwriter
unsuccessfully tries to provoke a reaction from the novelist. After leaving
Crew at the hospital, Jeremy returns home. Lowen tells him that Verity has been
faking her condition and that she was responsible for Harper’s drowning. She
shows him the manuscript.
A furious Jeremy confronts Verity and demands to know
the truth. A tearful Verity reacts, trying to explain herself, but Jeremy
attempts to choke her with his bare hands. Lowen warns him that the police will
discover that she has been assaulted and suggests that he cover her nose and
mouth, thereby killing her. They throw her body into the same lake where the
canoe accident took place. Both agree to tell the police that Verity must have
woken from her catatonic state, become confused, walked down to the lake and
jumped in.
Some time later, Lowen officially becomes the
continuation author of Verity Crawford’s novel series and is expecting a child
with Jeremy. They prepare to leave the house with Crew, but before doing so,
Lowen accidentally discovers a letter from Verity hidden in a secret
compartment in Crew’s room. In the handwritten letter, Verity explains that the
manuscript was an “antagonistic journal” suggested by her editor while she was
suffering from writer’s block and struggling to cope with her daughter’s
accidental death. Jeremy had been present at that meeting, but he had paid
little attention because he was bored by all the intellectual discussion. The
letter also reveals that Jeremy had seen the manuscript before and, knowing
that it ended with Verity expressing an intention to kill herself by crashing
her car, decided to make that ending a reality. He drugged her, placed her
behind the wheel and accelerated the vehicle towards some trees. Verity
survived, but was left disabled. She subsequently faked most of her condition
out of fear that Jeremy would finish the job and get rid of her. Crew was the
only one who knew the truth, and their bond had grown stronger after Harper’s
death. Verity had hoped to escape with him.
The film ends with Lowen and Jeremy together, abandoning the Vermont house with Crew and moving to another place. Lowen
concludes that Verity was exceptionally good at manipulating the truth. But
which truth was she manipulating?
The story invites the audience to choose a side. Those on “Team Manuscript” believe Verity did the atrocities described in the manuscript and later used the letter as a kind of alibi, hoping to convince everyone that she was innocent. “Team Letter”, on the other hand, maintains that the letter contains the truth: Jeremy plotted her death after finding a wicked manuscript that was nothing more than a writing exercise, a training ground for a future novel and an attempt to find the voice of a villain by using familiar settings.
I have several reasons for being on Team Letter, by
the way, but that is a discussion for another day.
Now, let’s focus on the comparison with Colleen Hoover’s story and the changes in the Bond franchise that led directly to Brosnan’s departure and, ultimately, to the destruction of the character as we had known him.
The film opens with an interview with Verity at her residence in Vermont, incidentally one of the locations featured in Ian Fleming’s short story For Your Eyes Only. We are treated to a few more snippets of interviews with Verity throughout the film, and something I immediately noticed was the flair, grace, warmth and sense of humour with which she speaks. Her manner is very reminiscent of the interviews Pierce Brosnan has given throughout his career. This is quite different from Daniel Craig’s often hesitant delivery, with its frequent pauses and filler words, which can give the impression that he is not entirely comfortable in front of an interviewer. From the very beginning, Verity has a distinctly regal aura.
This is juxtaposed with the life of Lowen Ashleigh,
whose novel has barely attracted any attention. Much like Craig before Bond,
Lowen is relatively unknown to the wider public. Verity’s fame, popularity and
worldwide recognition mirror Brosnan’s position before GoldenEye: he was
already well known as the leading star of Remington Steele, just as
Roger Moore had been recognised as Simon Templar in The Saint before
taking the role in Live And Let Die. Hachette is counting on Verity’s
popularity. She is a golden goose. And even though there were doubts about the
potential success of GoldenEye, Brosnan ultimately proved that there was
an audience out there that favoured him over other rumoured candidates such as
Liam Neeson, Mel Gibson and Hugh Grant.
Craig, by contrast, was a respected but considerably
less internationally recognised actor, with a varied filmography that included Lara
Croft: Tomb Raider, Road to Perdition and Layer Cake. It was
the latter, however, that particularly caught Barbara Broccoli’s eye and
convinced her that he was the right Bond to lead the franchise into its reboot.
This brings us to the scene in which Lowen is invited to
Hachette’s offices, where a prominent photograph of Verity posing with her
books hangs on the wall. Jeremy, the editors and the legal team are all
present. They offer Lowen a small fortune to follow in their bestselling author’s
footsteps by ghostwriting her upcoming, unfinished work. Initially, she turns
down the offer, believing herself unequal to such a huge challenge.
“You have this life. You have this perfect life and
you have everything that anyone could ever want and you don’t deserve it. And I’m
gonna take it from you. All of it. Your house. Your career. Your husband.”
This moment is particularly interesting because it
parallels the leitmotif of the Craig era. The justification for
rebooting the franchise was the alleged lack of realism in the Brosnan films:
the excessive action sequences in which “machine-gun Pierce” mowed down hordes
of villains, supposedly in the service of increasingly poor scripts. And yet,
rather curiously, the same screenwriting duo behind the last two Brosnan films
remained for the reboot. The reboot also brought back Martin Campbell, the
director of GoldenEye, and David
Arnold, the composer of Tomorrow Never
Dies, The World Is Not Enough and
Die Another Day. Judi Dench also
returned as M, albeit in the rebooted continuity. According to Dench’s autobiography, it was apparently Craig’s idea to have her character killed in Skyfall. It also retained several
familiar plot elements from the Brosnan films: M being threatened by someone
from her past, a rogue MI6 agent everyone believed to be dead striking back,
American intelligence agencies antagonising 007 as he pursues his objectives,
and Bond spending considerable portions of the story out of active service.
Furthermore, Craig himself has said that he wanted to
avoid the sort of situations associated with Austin Powers. And yet,
some of the major plot points and sequences in Austin Powers: The Spy Who
Shagged Me and Austin Powers in Goldmember have striking parallels
in Spectre and No Time To Die. Consider, for instance, the idea
of Bond and Blofeld being foster brothers, or one visiting the other in prison
to confront a common enemy. The irony is hard to miss.
Lowen appears to be the opposite of Verity: humble, innocent and modest. Deep down, however, she envies Verity’s regal qualities and the empire she has built through her talent and distinctive personality. She wants to take it all and redefine it as her own.
Craig, too, was presented as the opposite of Brosnan. According to some, one was realistic, the other campy; one had believable plots, the other ridiculous ones; one rejected gadgets, while the other supposedly depended on them. And yet Skyfall, the third film of the Craig era, reintroduced characters who were not supposed to return because they supposedly belonged to the old, discredited formula: Moneypenny and Q. It also brought back a gadget-laden Aston Martin DB5.
The Craig-Bond survives seemingly impossible situations
in every one of his films, even in the supposedly grounded Casino Royale
and Quantum of Solace. There is still no particularly satisfying explanation
for how he could have survived a depleted-uranium bullet, a sniper shot from a
considerable distance and a fall into the water that left him unconscious at
the beginning of Skyfall. All the elements that had supposedly been a
Sword of Damocles hanging over Brosnan’s head, justifying his departure and
turning his decade into the epitome of everything considered unrealistic,
old-fashioned and campy, came back with a cheeky lightness in an era when
realism increasingly became a synonym for defeatism.
The Craig era took so much from Brosnan: the plot
points, the creative personnel behind his films, the gadgets and the
spectacular action sequences. Somehow, it seemed that Brosnan had not deserved
those things, but Craig did. This attitude can certainly be found among certain
sections of the fandom, where some are quick to criticise the lack of realism
in an “invisible” car (based on technology the military was already putting
into practice in the early 2000s), while turning a blind eye to the fact that someone
could endure a heart attack, the stress of gambling, a car crash and a rope
striking him in the testicles, all in the same night.
The role of Jeremy in Verity is also
significant in this comparison. Jeremy Crawford is the one pulling the strings,
the one who brings Lowen into the picture because of a personal preference. In Being James Bond, Barbara acknowledges
that her determination to cast Craig had apparently created some tension with
the studio. “It was like... there wasn’t anyone else. That kept freaking the
studio out, because we kept saying ‘there is no one else, we don’t want anyone
else’. They kept trying to get us to meet people,” she said.
Eight years after Cubby's death in 1996, Barbara Broccoli was
facing a challenge. She knew Brosnan represented the continuity of
her father’s legacy: the Bond who saved the world and got the girl, the one who
sneered in the face of danger, the one who could walk through the Casino de
Monte-Carlo without looking like a thug who barely spoke. But she seemed
determined to change that, and the emergence of the Jason Bourne films, together
with the growing appetite for rebooting established characters, gave her a
golden opportunity to change the rules.
It is rather like Verity’s apparently induced car
accident giving Jeremy the opportunity to move his wife out of the way and
bring a new woman into the fold. Another justification for Brosnan’s departure
was that, at 51, he was supposedly “too old” to play Bond in an origin story,
despite his youthful appearance. A 37-year-old actor whom Barbara seemed
particularly keen on was then chosen instead. The crisis became an opportunity.
“You’re a prisoner in your own home. You can take
selfish moments,” Lowen tells Jeremy shortly before they make love. It is a
line Craig could easily have said to Barbara as she faced the dilemma –if she
ever considered it– of following her father’s principles or setting them aside
and reshaping Bond in her own image.
Among what I regard as Barbara’s selfish decisions
were the misguided placement of the gunbarrel sequence, the constant labelling
of Bond as “an assassin” even when it is crystal clear that, unlike the
villains, he never willingly lets innocent people die, and the decision to make
him old and fallible in Skyfall and No Time To Die, to the point where he
bows before a villain whom Sean Connery could have dispatched while swatting a
fly.
The franchise went from releasing films every two
years to enduring gaps of three, four and even six years. Some of those delays
were connected to production difficulties and uncertainty about Craig’s return.
Meanwhile, Barbara was also pursuing other projects, including a stage
production of Macbeth and the not-so successful films Film
Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool and The
Rhythm Section, both released during the long gap between Spectre and No Time To Die.
And here we come to the most brutal moment: the
regicide itself. The death of Verity Crawford. The death of James Bond. The
character whose trademark identity, carried through five actors from Sean
Connery to Pierce Brosnan, was that of an unkillable hero.
Lowen gives Jeremy the manuscript of So Be It, Verity’s supposed
autobiography, which, strangely enough, has the structure of a crime novel when
compared with something like Roger Moore’s My Word Is My Bond. “It’s Verity’s confession. She wrote it!” declares Lowen,
leaving no room for doubt.
Five seconds later, Jeremy has pulled Verity out of
her wheelchair and is crushing her windpipe as she pleads for mercy and a
chance to explain herself. Lowen stands beside them, and for a moment there is
silence. Then the newcomer at the Crawford estate delivers her verdict:
“You’re crushing her windpipe! [...] They’ll know you
killed her. You have to make it look like an accident. Cover her nose and mouth
until she stops breathing. Don’t leave any marks.”
Jeremy proceeds. Once Verity is dead, they throw her
body into the lake.
In the years following the release of No Time To
Die in 2021, Daniel Craig discussed his involvement in the decision to kill
Bond. In an interview with The Times, he recalled driving away from the
Berlin premiere of Casino Royale with Barbara Broccoli and asking how
many more films he would make. When she answered four, he followed up with
another question: “OK. Then can I kill him off?” She agreed. Craig subsequently
explained that he believed killing Bond would allow them to begin again, and
that he thought Barbara shared that view. According to his account, MGM
initially resisted the idea, and the decision had to be kept secret.
I have often wondered whether the outcome would have been the same had Daniel Craig never been cast as Bond. Would Barbara Broccoli have considered killing the character if Pierce Brosnan had continued for another film, or if someone like Clive Owen or Henry Cavill had taken over? I find that difficult to imagine. Given Cubby Broccoli’s affection for Bond and his understanding of him as a triumphant hero, I suspect that Barbara would have been considerably less inclined to contemplate such an ending without Craig’s influence. Of course, the decision was ultimately hers to approve and Craig could never have made it on his own. But I believe he was the one who brought that possibility into the equation and, more importantly, wanted it to become the defining conclusion of his tenure.
There is a similar dynamic in Verity. Jeremy is already crushing his wife’s windpipe, but he hesitates before delivering the final blow. It is Lowen who tells him what to do next. Jeremy remains the one who physically kills Verity, just as Barbara remains the one who ultimately approved Bond’s death. But Lowen provides the decisive encouragement, just as Craig claims to have done in the case of 007.
As a shocked Jeremy struggles to process what he has
done, Lowen comforts him: “We did the right thing. We’re good people.” She also
tells him that they will come up with a story to justify Verity’s death to the
authorities. There were certainly ways for Broccoli and Craig to justify the
ending of No Time To Die, beginning with the ironic “James Bond Will
Return” disclaimer at the very last second of the film. It feels like a sick
joke when compared with what that line has always represented.
There is another aspect of Craig’s tenure that makes
this decision particularly interesting. He has said that the possibility of
killing Bond was raised as early as 2006, but the subsequent films never gave
the impression of following a clearly defined narrative plan towards that
destination. In Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, Bond is still a
relatively inexperienced agent finding his feet. By Skyfall, he has become a highly trained operative, albeit one who
appears to have lost a step and is struggling to keep up with the demands of
the job. Then comes Spectre, which
offers what feels like a natural sense of finality: the villain is connected to
the events of the previous films, Bond finally discovers the identity of the
man behind his personal tragedies, and he rides off into the sunset with
Madeleine Swann. It is, arguably, the closest thing to a happy ending Craig’s
Bond ever receives.
The marketing campaign for Spectre even used the slogan “Everything has led to this”. Yet No Time To Die would later recycle that
very same sense of finality, heavily promoting itself as the definitive conclusion to Craig’s tenure. It almost feels as though the fifth film was made
to undo the happiness of the previous ending and replace it with the tragic
fate that some people believed Bond deserved. Rather than witnessing
the conclusion of a story carefully planned from the beginning, we are left
with the impression of a cycle whose direction was decided one film at a time,
with its definitive ending settled much later. The idea of killing Bond may
have been floated in 2006, but the films themselves do not suggest that this
was an inevitable destination. By the time No
Time To Die was being developed, around 2016 and 2017, Bond’s image had
also become the subject of increasingly intense moral scrutiny in the media, paralleling
the Soviet Union’s discredit of Bond’s image through Izvestia and other publications described in James Fleming’s study Bond Behind The Iron Curtain. One could
argue that the final decision was therefore shaped not simply by the internal
logic of Craig’s story, but by the cultural climate surrounding the character
at the time.
Of course, there were more conventional justifications: that this was a self-contained cycle, as though Bond could be reduced to the kind of stunts pulled by science-fiction franchises aimed at teenage audiences; that “Fleming also killed Bond” in From Russia, With Love and You Only Live Twice, as though Bond were not very much alive in Dr. No and The Man With The Golden Gun, or as though, even in death-defying situations, he had ever stopped fighting for his own survival.
And yet, many filmgoers seemed satisfied with those explanations. Much like the Vermont police officers who thought that a woman in a catatonic state –even if she had been faking part of it– could simply have got up from her wheelchair on a stormy, windy day, walked down the stairs, opened a heavy wooden door and jumped into the lake in a state of confusion, without anyone hearing a thing.
The death of Verity Crawford was ruled an accident. The death of James Bond was presented as something Ian Fleming himself would supposedly have wanted to see. Case closed.
“It was done. It could not be undone. We were free
from Verity,” Lowen narrates as we watch the novelist’s body sink into the
lake. And, unfortunately, I agree with that first part. Before Barbara and Craig
could be free of Bond, their actions had made it impossible to undo what they
had done. They established that killing off 007 was a possibility, and Amazon
MGM might well consider it again at some point.
That is why I openly reject anything Bond-related
after Die Another Day and the Everything or Nothing video game
(or Electronic Arts' From Russia With Love, actually). This was something that could not
be undone, certainly not by introducing yet another “origin story” such as First
Light, or whatever they decide to put on the big screen next. Barbara allowed
a temporary figure to make permanent decisions. Jeremy allowed the newcomer to
dictate his wife’s fate on the basis of evidence taken out of context.
For these reasons, the whole situation in Verity
brings to mind the final paragraphs of Casino Royale, where Bond
reflects that while he had been playing “the red Indians”, the real enemy had
been acting “coldly, right there at his elbow”. Lowen played her game quietly,
and as soon as she saw an opportunity to kill the Queen and take over her
kingdom, she seized it.
Craig, too, certainly did not pass up the opportunity
to kill the ace of spies when he found himself in a position where Barbara had
publicly admitted that she could not imagine Bond after him.
One detail I noticed among the film’s subtler touches
was that one character calls Lowen “Low”, while another –none other than Verity’s
son, Crew– calls her “LowLow” towards the end. Of course, it is an affectionate
nickname, but we all know what “low” means: something that falls short of the
standards, something beneath what is expected. Lowen delivers a low blow
reminiscent of what happens to Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo:
she takes over Verity’s empire and secures a future for herself almost out of
thin air. She becomes somebody after being next to nobody.
Killing off James Bond at a time when audiences were
waiting for the character’s return, while much of the world was still dealing
with the coronavirus pandemic, was certainly a low blow – particularly for
those who back in 2005 (like myself) had spoken up in favour of giving Daniel Craig a chance
when so many people doubted that the “short blonde guy” was up to the challenge
of following Pierce Brosnan and the four distinguished actors who had played
Bond before him.
Verity is now available to rent or buy on Prime Video in
selected markets.
If you’re interested in exploring more about the
Pierce Brosnan era, I recommend reading my book The Bond of The Millennium,
available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon, as well as in a Digital Special
Edition through ZOOM Platform.
Stills of Verity © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Stills of Die Another Day © 2002 Danjaq, LLC and United Artists Corporation.
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