In a new interview in the Independent, British actor James Purefoy confirms he missed out on the role of James Bond twice: first to Pierce Brosnan and then to Daniel Craig. 

"There have been jobs, Bond being one of them, where you get very close to getting something and then you start pulling away because the ramifications of what would happen if you got it become a little troubling,” he told the paper. “The closer I got to Bond, the more I wasn’t really sure.”

"From what I gather, [Daniel Craig] turned it down two or three times because of a similar thing – being uncomfortable with being locked into a massive corporate world where you’re gonna spend more time publicising the movie and wearing watches and suits and having to go to photoshoots and publicity drives… and you end up having to deal with a lot of stuff that you’d just really rather not deal with because it’s not your job. It’s not what you do. What you do is exist as somebody else between action and cut. That’s the purest and most interesting part of the job."

"The Bond thing…” he sighed. "I kind of wish it had never been found out that I’d gone up for Bond. It has plagued my life – the job that I didn’t get."