Hiddleston is just too ‘effete’ to be new Bond

HIS suave turn as an undercover agent in The Night Manager caught the eye of James Bond producers — but Tom Hiddleston has been damned as not manly enough to star as 007.

Nineties heart-throb Marcus Gilbert, who played brutish aristocrat Rupert Campbell-Black in the hit adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster Riders, says Old Etonian Hiddleston is typical of the expensively educated pretty boy actors who dominate showbusiness.

‘Posh actors like Tom Hiddleston are handsome, but they tend to be slightly effete and lack that innate masculine hardness and sense of danger you need for the sexy role,’ Gilbert tells me at the launch party for Jilly’s latest novel, Mount! ‘There are too many of them who seem to be getting all the breaks, like being up for the Bond part. Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch and that chap from Poldark [Aidan Turner] who is wonderful-looking — they are just not hard enough.’

Hiddleston has become a household name through his brief, but wellpublicised, relationship with popstar Taylor Swift — it was reported this week that their ‘fairytale romance’ is over after just three months.

Gilbert, 58, has inside knowledge when it comes to the 007 role. ‘I was in the frame for Bond myself back in the Nineties,’ he adds. ‘I’ve heard Daniel Craig has been offered an eye-watering deal to stay. He’s definitely better than this new wave of posh ones.’