If you like your cocktails shaken, not stirred, then you’ll love our 10 best spies in movies. Also, why are you drinking such weak-ass cocktails? Shaking them further dilutes the ice at a faster rate. You are basically ordering a worse drink and having an attitude about it.
Clearly, you love spies as much as I do, so you’re forgiven. As a kid I wanted to do two things when I grew up: run a restaurant in my parents’ basement and be a spy. I did not believe these things to be mutually exclusive. Children really do have a wonderful imagination and a terrible understanding of clandestine data collection and geo-political maneuvering.
Despite owning a lot of Spytech plastic equipment and taking copious notes on my sisters’ activities I did not end up a spy. However, I can live vicariously through spy movies. Watching highly-trained spies jump into action and stop villainous plots is much more comfortable from the couch than, say, the top of a speeding train. Spy movies also don’t always have to be action, often they are a mix of drama, comedy, crime thriller and a certain level of parody or cheekiness.
Stokkete/Shutterstock.com
The spy genre became popular after World War 2, because in the post-war period, the governments of many countries began to invest a lot of money in the secret services sector in order to secure national security from different kinds of threats. Spy movies were one of the most popular genres during The Cold War and that spanned 40-50 years, so that’s plenty of time for a few great spies to be born. We will check out the 10 best spies in movies.
We have already talked about the 7 of the Greatest Spies Who Ever Lived: List of Famous Spies of All Time, and now it is time to move to the big screen and find the best spies in movies. There are a lot of popular spy movies which earn a lot of money and have a lot of fans. That raises a question, are the spy movies with a great profit and big audiences actually the best spy movies which have the best spy roles? The best grossing movie doesn’t guarantee a good spy movie and the best spy actor. Because, the best gross movie probably has the best advertisement campaign and enough money for promotion, and of course huge special effects. That shouldn’t be the main indicator that one movie is better than the another one.
So, what indicator should we you use to identify the best spies in movies? Firstly, we find top 30 best grossing movies through Box Office Mojo. For each movie in that list, we are going to identify the actor/actress who has a lead role and also find out, did he or she perform all the stunts? Since it is very hard to find any valuable and official information about movies stunts performed by actors we used the pool from IMDB, the biggest movie database. We took this into consideration because those are the opinions from spy movie fans. Now we have top 10 movies sorted by total gross and stunts and in order to find 10 best spies in movies, we have to do one more thing. We have to calculate how many awards they won for the each role from that list. IMDB again help us to finish this task.
Now it’s time to share our results with you. This is the list of 10 best spies in movies:
10. The Bourne Identity
Actor: Matt Damon
Number of awards: 0
The Bourne Identity is action spy movie from the 2002 year. The lead role is Matt Damon and he was basically bourne for this one.
9. Tomorrow Never Dies
Actor: Pierce Brosnan
Number of awards: 1
Tomorrow Never Dies is the eighteenth spy movie from James Bond series. The lead role belongs to excellent actor Pierce Brosnan, which is actually his second role as a James Bond. For this movie, he won Saturn Award for the Best Actor.
8. Charlie’s Angels
Actress: Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu
Number of awards: 1
Charlie’s Angels is the action comedy spy movie. Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu are the angels who work for their elusive boss, Charlie. Cameron Diaz won Imagen Award for Best Actress in this movie.
7. The Bourne Supremacy
Actor: Matt Damon
Number of awards: 1
Here is another movie from Bourne series. For this one, Matt Damon won Empire Award for the best actor and that brings him to the seventh position of our list.
6. Skyfall
Actor: Daniel Craig
Number of awards: 1
Skyfall is 23rd James Bond movie and the lead role for this one is Daniel Craig. Daniel brings the new color and different perspective for this series because he is very different from Pierce and has a different energy. He won Critics Choice Award for this role. The intro credits alone make this one worth watching.
5. Mission: Impossible
Actor: Tom Cruise
Number of awards: 1
As you expected, we have Mission Impossible movie on the 10 best spies in movies list. For this one, Tom Cruise won Blimp Award for Favorite Movie Actor.
4. The World Is Not Enough
Actor: Pierce Brosnan
Number of awards: 2
Another James Bond movie on our list. This time, Pierce Brosnan won two awards for its role. Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Actor and Empire Award for Best Actor.
3. Clear and Present Danger
Actor: Harrison Ford
Number of awards: 2
This is classic spy movie that we like and it has it all: drama, action, thriller and Indiana Jones. Harrison Ford is the lead and he won two Blockbuster Entertainment Awards for this role.
2. Mission: Impossible II
Actor: Tom Cruise
Number of awards: 2
Tom Cruise won two awards for this movie: Special Silver Ribbon for Producing and Acting in the Film and MTV Movie Award for Best Male performance.
1. Casino Royale
Actor: Daniel Craig
Number of awards: 4
The first place of the list 10 best spies in movies is Casino Royale. Daniel Craig won 4 awards for this role: Empire Award (Best Actor), Evening Standard British Film Award (Best Actor), Golden Schmoes (Breakthrough Performance of the Year) and Sant Jordi (Best Foreign Actor).
