Sean Connery Compared Rise to Fame as James Bond to Living in a 'Goldfish Bowl': 'It Became Preposterous' Angela AndaloroOctober 20, 2025 at 12:00 AM 0 Bettmann Archive Sean Connery as James Bond in 1966.
- - Sean Connery Compared Rise to Fame as James Bond to Living in a 'Goldfish Bowl': 'It Became Preposterous'
Angela AndaloroOctober 20, 2025 at 12:00 AM
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Sean Connery as James Bond in 1966. -
Sean Connery sat down with Barbara Walters in 1987 to talk about his career
Connery starred in five back-to-back Bond films from 1962 to 1967, returning for one more in 1971
The actor explained the downsides to being Bond and why he decided to walk away
Sean Connery was honest about his struggles with portraying James Bond.
As the film's first 007, the actor defined and was responsible for the character's immense popularity. However, that kind of attention wasn't always easy or comfortable, he admitted to Barbara Walters during a 1987 interview with the journalist, who noted he "walked away and were somewhat angry about them."
Connery starred in five back-to-back Bond films from 1962 to 1967. After sitting one movie out, allowing George Lazenby to take over the one-off with On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1967, Connery returned for his final Bond film in 1971's Diamonds Are Forever.
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'Dr No' 1962 Sean Connery as James Bond.
"The last one, this experience, this kind of goldfish bowl pressure of being where one was in that time, it's very difficult to understand my behavior," he explained. "But, for example, the demand was enormous for publicity and exposure — people [were] coming on the sets and it was very, very difficult."
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"And the films were difficult! And got more and more difficult for me to make because they were never well planned. They were always being written... It became the tail wagging the dog, and I don't like that."
Connery was honest about "the attention" being part of the problem with continuing in the role.
"The only comparison was like, you'd say with the Beatles," he said. However, he noted that there were "four of them" in the English rock band to distribute all the attention among, while there was only one of him.
"But when you're on your own, it makes you... you know, in places like Japan, the guy's coming in with the cameras in the toilet. It really became preposterous."
The Bond legend died on Oct. 31, 2020, at his home in the Bahamas at age 90. When friends remembered him during that time, racing driver Sir Jackie Stewart celebrated that Connery was "above all a Scot."
"There was nobody more Scottish than Sean and he never changed it," Stewart told PEOPLE at the time. "When he was a Russian submarine captain in The Hunt for Red October and all the movies he did, he was still Scottish. The Scottish voice was still there, and it was always 'Sean from Scotland.' And he was a very, very proud Scot."
"Scotland was in his heart, his home," Stewart added. "Sean Connery was above all a Scot. But he was a global Scot."
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