Is James Bond A Horse Boi?
1983's Never Say Never Again showcases James Bond's contempt for our equine friends by forcing a horse to pull a Greg Louganis and go high diving.
Amid the uninspired and confusing Never Say Never Again, Sean Connery’s James Bond and Kim Basinger’s Domino are trying to escape from a castle. They’re riding a horse along a high ledge. Henchmen are right on their heels.
And then, with little warning, James Bond decides he’s going to high dive this horse off the ledge and into the water below.
WATCH THAT AGAIN. HE MAKES THE HORSE JUMP OFF A CASTLE.
This makes no sense—not just within the rules of the movie, but also out here in the reality we’re all experiencing. It is an inexplicable and mean and aggressively strange choice on so many levels.
Let’s, like our horse friend, dive deeper into this unfortunate situation.
Why are James Bond and Domino jumping off the side of a castle on a horse?
Lots of people in Bond movies jump off of high things. They’re constantly skiing off of cliffs or bungee jumping off giant dams. But there's no reason why Jimmy B and his special lady friend need to take the horse with them into the water. Just dismount and jump like reasonable people. You don’t need to bring a friendly, joyful animal into this near-death scenario.
By this scene, this horse had already had a big day. He has been shot at. He probably has a fear of heights, and is dealing with being ridden around on top of a castle. Plus, a strange man with a problematic history with women is riding him around, and because horses are very good judges of character, it makes the impromptu ride all the more challenging for him.
All of that, and then Bond forces the horse to high dive. This horse is having a bad time.
What do we know about the horse?
Plenty, thanks to Vic Armstrong’s book, The True Adventures of the World's Greatest Stuntman: My Life as Indiana Jones, James Bond, Superman and Other Movie Heroes. A prolific stuntman and action unit director, Armstrong doubled Connery in the film and goes into lengthy detail to describe the background work the crew and the horse—who was named Toupee—did to prepare for the stunt.
Note: Toupee is a great horse name.
“We decided to shoot that in Nassau,” Armstrong writes, “putting the horse and myself on top of a 40 foot tower inside a box that could be tilted forward, just like the old shows on Coney Island where horses slid out of traps into water tanks.”
Armstrong continues, saying that the crew trained the horse to swim to shore and climb out via a ramp once they dropped him. They even gave the horse “endurance training so he had enough energy to swim properly.”
I don’t know what Toupee was thinking when all of this went down. But per Jerry Seinfeld's theory about horses, our sweet Toupee was probably not thinking "hell yeah, I'm going do a half gainer off this platform and it's gonna look friggin sweet on camera."
More likely, Toupee was thinking "Oat bag, I get my oat bag now, at bag time for me.”
So with all that training and preparation, everything went great when they filmed the stunt, right?
Nope.
As you can see from this diagram, Bond and Domino have jumped clear, leaving Toupee to hit the water with (thankfully) no one on top of him. Our horsey hero goes donk-first into the water, creating a giant, horse-donk-sized splash.
Armstrong writes that the guy who operated the trap door to send the horse and riders into the water opened the door too early, which freaked out the horse and caused him to clamber toward the back of the box. Which, if I were Toupee, seems like the only reasonable thing to do.
“In the end, everyone manually lifted the box up and as we slide out, the horse’s last reaction was to try and rear up in a bid to go over backwards, so I held his head forwards as we went down absolutely vertically,” Armstrong wrote.
I think we’re all in agreement that did not go great.
How should a horse high dive into water?
That is a question open to interpretation. As anyone who taped Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken off the Disney Channel when they were kids will attest, horses have been jumping off of high things into bodies of water for a very long time. During these dives, they are often ridden by young women with a troubled past and multiple love interests, making the horse jumping a metaphor for her emotional journey.
The Wild Hearts horses generally go belly first into the water, whereas the famed King and Queen horses of Coney Island would jump face first into the water. According to some sources, the Coney Island horses loved diving headfirst because that's how they reached their mother as foals.
While my research was not exhaustive, I can’t find any well known horse diving outfit sending their steeds donk-first into the water.
Does James Bond ever check on the horse after he rides it off the castle?
Nope. Bond just swims away, with not even a glance in our four-legged friend’s direction. This is the last shot of Toupee in the movie:
It would have been entirely appropriate for Bond to salute Toupee, who could have delighted the audience with a jaunty kick and a neigh. Bond could have even shed a single tear and whispered "thank you, you sweet horsey angel. I am honored by your bravery today." They could have parted as friends.
Meanwhile, other stuntmen in other Bond movies are doing amazing things outside an airplane.
In 1983, two Bond films hit theaters — Never Say Never Again, and Octopussy. And for all its failings, Octopussy is trying to hit dingers from start to finish, including a mid-air fight sequence that features a stuntman HOLDING ON TO A PLANE WHILE UPSIDE DOWN.
The “let’s drop a horse” stunt feels emblematic of Never Say Never Again as a whole. The film took a checklist approach to stunts and cars and locations and gadgets without ever trying to make them remarkable or interesting or even fun.
Toupee deserved better. I hope he got more work—he was a great horse, and was the best part of this movie. I’m sorry that you got dropped on your donk, buddy. I hope you got that oat bag.