James Bond and Valentin Zukovsky: From Enemies to Friends

Scottish actor Robbie Coltrane died last Friday at the age of 72 and millions of Harry Potter fans waved goodbye to the corpulent man who incarnated Rubeus Hagrid in the big-screen adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s novels. However, for action movie fans, Coltrane will be best remembered as ex-KGB agent and arms dealer Valentin Zukovsky in two James Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan: GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough. 

Released in 1995, GoldenEye marked Brosnan’s long-awaited debut as Ian Fleming’s secret agent. It was the first Bond film released after the fall of the Soviet Union, a geopolitical scenario few people expected the secret agent to survive or be useful to. Far from ignoring the new geopolitics, scribes Michael France, Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein explicitly placed 007 in the new Russia to fight the Janus syndicate, a mysterious organization tied to their mafia with a dangerous electromagnetic weapon in their hands..

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