‘Q’ may stand for Quartermaster but the character has developed as more than an armourer or supplier of state-of-the-art gadgets. Played by four actors – Peter Burton, Desmond Llewelyn, John Cleese, and Ben Whishaw – in 22 of the 25 James Bond films, he is by turns a source of important intel, a useful accomplice in the field, a mentor and, on many occasions, a life saver. Q’s character has been portrayed as an exasperated father figure and a young opinionated super geek. Every iteration is a perfectly pitched foil for 007, with their relationship filled with sparks, humour and an understated warmth.
Bond may have no regard for Q’s gadgets, despite how many times they save his life, but he undoubtedly has an underlying affection for the man. “For me Q is like Merlin,” Pierce Brosnan once said of the character. “The last person Bond sees before he goes out on a mission. ‘Pay attention Bond, these are your tricks’.”
Q started life on screen as Major Boothroyd in Dr. No, played by Peter Burton, replacing Bond’s Beretta pistol with his signature Walther PPK handgun. When Burton proved unavailable for From Russia With Love, the role, from here known as Q, was taken over by Desmond Llewelyn, a run that lasted for 17 films. In From Russia With Love, Q gives Bond a very functional run through of his gadgets: a standard attaché case kitted out with a throwing-knife, anti-tampering mechanism with a magnetised tear-gas cartridge disguised as a tin of talcum powder, fifty concealed gold sovereigns and an Armalite AR-7 Survival Rifle.
It is in Goldfinger that the Q-Bond rapport becomes an integral part of the films.
“At the rehearsal stage, I was working at a desk, Bond comes in and I got up to meet him,” Llewelyn recalled. “And Guy [Hamilton, director] said, ‘No, no, no, no. You don’t take any notice of this man. You don’t like him.’ And I thought, ‘But this is Bond, this is James Bond and I’m just an ordinary civil servant. I must admire him like everybody else does.’ Guy says, ‘No, no, no, no. Of course you don’t. He doesn’t treat your gadgets with any respect at all. So when you’re describing the things on the car, you know perfectly well he’s not going to treat them with the respect they should have.’ And, of course, the penny dropped and the whole thing came together.”
The scene also gave us a key line. When Q informs Bond the Aston Martin has an ejector seat, the secret agent suggests he must be joking. Q famously responds, “I never joke about my work, 007”.
While Q never joked about his work, the notoriously mischievous Roger Moore, who first worked with Llewelyn on The Man With The Golden Gun, would later play tricks on the actor when it came to playing Q’s tech briefing scenes. “Desmond always had reams of the most impossible dialogue to utter,” said Moore. “And if that wasn’t bad enough, I would sit down with the script supervisor, write gobbledegook dialogue, get her to type it up, give it to [director] John Glen, and say, ‘This is the new dialogue, give it to Desmond one minute before the take’. Poor Desmond fell for it every time.”
As well as equipping 007 in his lab, Q has also played a pivotal role in assisting Bond on his missions in the field. He has left his laboratory and headed out a number of times, demonstrating numerous gadgets in the Bahamas in Thunderball and gifting Bond the new, improved auto-gyro named Little Nellie in Japan in You Only Live Twice. But it took Timothy Dalton’s second adventure Licence To Kill to deliver Llewelyn’s most substantial role as Q goes to Isthmus to help 007 by posing as Bond’s uncle.
“I loved this film because I had a large part in it!” recalled Llewelyn. “I’d never really been on location before, so I loved every minute of it.”
Pierce Brosnan’s first 007 film, GoldenEye, features Q at his most impish. Entering the lab, 007 discovers his quartermaster in a wheelchair with his leg in a plaster cast. Bond asks if it was a skiing accident and Q fires a rocket out of his cast against the wall and quips, “Hunting”. Q also introduces Bond to his BMW Z3, armed with Stinger Missiles, an X-Ray document scanner and a pen armed with a grenade.
Llewelyn increasingly found it difficult to remember the jargon filled dialogue and was aided by a series of cue cards, dubbed Q Cards, positioned off camera. “When you don’t understand the gadgets you are explaining, it is easy to get things mixed up,” he explained. By the time of The World Is Not Enough, Llewelyn was aged 85 and didn’t want to be saddled with pages of difficult dialogue. As Q exits the scene descending in an elevator, Llewelyn movingly delivers some final words of advice for Bond.
Q: “Now pay attention 007, I’ve always tried to teach you two things: first, never let them see you bleed.”
Bond: “And the second?”
Q: “Always have an escape plan…”
John Cleese was cast as his successor, nicknamed R by 007 in The World Is Not Enough. In Die Another Day, R has been promoted to Q, giving Bond a glass shattering ring, a sonic agitator that can shatter unbreakable glass, a new laser emitting, mine disarming watch and the Aston Martin V12 Vanquish that Q calls ‘The Vanish” due to its adaptive camouflage that makes it appear invisible.
After being rested for Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace, Q returned in Skyfall. “It’s very hard to replace Desmond Llewelyn, who has a very special place in our hearts and the hearts of audiences, but to reintroduce the character of Q it seemed appropriate, considering the times we live in, that he would be a young whippersnapper,” Barbara Broccoli said. “Ben Whishaw was the obvious choice. He has this wonderful openness to him, intelligence, and real wit.”
And taking on the role, Whishaw soon realised what Q means to fans. “When I told people I was playing Q, I became even more excited because people’s reactions were so big,” Whishaw explained. “I was amazed, and I don’t think I had really understood until then what the Bond franchise, and this character, actually means to people.”
Bond, now played by Daniel Craig, and the new Q first meet at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square in London in front of JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, 1839. It’s a cagey meeting, the former wary of Q’s youth, the latter dismissive of Bond’s deeply entrenched old school views.
“At first the relationship between Bond and Q is a little strained, particularly on Bond’s part,” Whishaw said. “Q is from a new generation that Bond is just not a part of. Q has a self-possession, a deep-seated confidence in himself and his brilliance, and is surprised that Bond might be unhappy with Q having this position. Q stands up to Bond. Q holds his ground, and I think that impresses Bond.”
Later Q places a crucial part in the plot to outwit cyber-criminal Silva (Javier Bardem), laying a trail of digital breadcrumbs to help draw the mastermind to Bond’s family home, Skyfall. In Spectre, he goes even further, not only helping Bond to go off grid at the risk of his job but also overcoming his fear of flying to travel to Austria, decoding the SPECTRE ring to confirm the existence of the organisation.
No Time To Die features a series’ first: a glimpse of Q’s home, including a modular synthesiser, royal family knick-knacks and two bald Sphynx cats (“You know, they make them with hair these days.” Bond quips). Still Q is called into action, investigating files related to Project Heracles, providing Bond with a watch that emits an electromagnetic pulse that can short any circuit in a hardwired network and keeping tabs on the infiltration of Safin (Rami Malek)’s lair via Q.DAR, his self-designed three-dimensional map system.
From trick briefcases to hi-tech tracking systems, Q has moved with, and ahead, of the modern world. But there is something about his flair, wit and ingenuity that has remained timeless.
007 Science: Inventing the World of James Bond, the very first exhibition focussing on the technology of 007’s 25 adventures is open at The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Read more here.
