The longest casting search in Hollywood is down to its final room. According to Deadline, final screen tests for the role of James Bond could begin as early as Friday and run through next week, with at least four actors receiving test offers for what will be the first Bond film of the Amazon MGM era. Three of the four expected to test are Jack Lowden, Callum Turner and Josh O’Connor. The fourth name is being kept quiet, and multiple sources tell Deadline it is not Jacob Elordi, despite a report earlier this week that had the Euphoria and Frankenstein star all but announced.

The tests were originally planned for earlier this month and were pushed to the end of October so all four actors could be tested at the same time, in the same conditions, in front of the same people making the decision: casting director Nina Gold, director Denis Villeneuve, and producers Amy Pascal and David Heyman. Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders, is writing the film. Pascal has said a decision by the end of the year is a safe bet, with production expected to begin in 2027 toward a planned 2028 release.

For actors, this is the part of the process worth understanding. Nobody inherits Bond. As one insider put it earlier this year, there is absolutely no one getting this role without testing for it, and a final test at this level is not a formality: it is the role performed on camera, in the tux, against the other finalists’ versions of the same scenes, judged side by side. The simultaneous scheduling is deliberate. It removes the slow leak of momentum that builds around whoever tests first, and it forces a direct comparison of the only thing that has ever decided this part, which is what happens to a room when the actor walks into it as Bond.

The three named finalists make the comparison genuinely interesting. Lowden, 36, is the Slow Horses lead, a Scottish actor who has spent four seasons playing brilliance curdling into failure, and he would be only the second Scot to hold the role after Sean Connery. Turner, 36, comes off Masters of the Air and the Fantastic Beasts films, the most conventionally matinee of the three. O’Connor, 36, is the Emmy winner from The Crown and the co-lead of Challengers, the most decorated actor in the group and the least obvious physical fit, which in Bond history has never been a disqualification: Connery was a former milkman and bodybuilder, Daniel Craig was a respected supporting actor, and neither was a household name when the tests made them inevitable.

Also out of the running, per the same reporting: Jack O’Connell, whose name circulated for months. The rumor mill will keep spinning until Amazon MGM makes it official, and the studio’s only statement this year has been that the search is underway. But the search now has a room, a week, and four chairs in it. By the time the tests wrap, the next James Bond will in all likelihood have been chosen. The rest of us just have to wait for the announcement.

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