Given that No Time to Die did not end up remaking Dr. No, despite rumors, why is Rami Malek's villain, Safin, so similar to Dr. No himself? No Time To Die is a James Bond movie that openly celebrates the franchise, with many aspects of the film hearkening back to previous entries in some way, and Safin has a distinct kinship to the very first villain in the Bond legacy, Dr. No. No Time to Die is an interesting Bond film with deep layers and it leaves audiences asking many questions, one being, ‘is, or was, Safin supposed to be Dr. No?’ The answer is officially no, as confirmed by No Time to Die director and co-screenwriter, Cary Fukunaga. Nevertheless, there are many aspects – about the film itself, as well as its pre-release marketing – which seem to suggest otherwise.
The 25th James Bond film, and the fifth and final Daniel Craig Bond film, nods back to many well-known moments and elements in the series, including Safin’s likeness to the character of Dr. No. The opening scene of No Time to Die sees a masked Safin murder Mr. White’s wife and attempt to murder his daughter too before she shoots him several times and drags his seemingly dead body out onto the ice. His torso shows a nasty bullet hole exactly where his heart would be, but as he suddenly regains consciousness the audience is reminded of James Bond's first villain, Dr. No, whose heart was famously on the right side of his chest rather than his left. Similarly, like Dr. No’s lair, Safin’s lair is set on an island, there is the possibility of Safin wearing gloves to hide his metal hands, he wears a Japanese ‘Noh’ mask at the beginning, and he is referred to as ‘doctor’ on one instance by one of his men. It all teases the imagination.
But it’s an imagination that is partly feeding off of certain ideas prevalent to the Daniel Craig tenure of Bond films. Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012), Spectre (2015), and No Time to Die all helped to establish a James Bond origin story, which in turn suggests a possible link-up with the beginning of the official series, starting with Dr. No. Additionally, with Blofeld coming back in Spectre, many naturally assumed the 007 Easter egg-packed No Time to Die would take a similar road in reintroducing a classic Bond villain in the new entry. The marketing of the film, leading up to its release, was buying into much of this theorization, and even Rami Malek himself helped fuel these theories. It almost felt like the filmmakers and studio wanted to weaponize the James Bond nostalgia that had worked so well previously to suggest No Time To Die was even more tied to 007's past than it ended up being.
These five Daniel Craig Bond films have acted as a five-part prequel origin story of James Bond. Therefore it would be logical to assume this last part, No Time to Die, would then join up with the first film in the original series, Dr. No, in some significant way. In Spectre, Blofeld, a classic, franchise-defining villain from the early Bond films, was reintroduced in this five-part origin story. At the time, the marketers for Spectre, and Christoph Waltz himself, all insisted that Franz Oberhauser absolutely was not going to be the character of Blofeld, which turned out to be untrue. Therefore, fans naturally may have thought the same trick was going to be pulled again with the speculations of Safin being Dr. No.
Furthermore, Rami Malek had been notably coy with regard to the speculations. In an interview with Esquire UK, he suggested that “Safin is not who he seems,” before going on to tease, “I have to be extremely careful. I can’t really talk about the character,” in response to rumors that his character is actually Dr. No. In the same interview, Malek continued, “Am I? I mean, isn’t that an exciting thing to consider all the way up to the release? There is a resurgence of an Ian Fleming influence on this film.” Ultimately, that tease was paid off with a simple narrative contrivance and not a character familiar to James Bond fans.
There was plenty of justified reasoning as to why people were convinced Safin was going to be revealed as Dr. No in No Time to Die. The chronological timeline aspects of the films themselves left much to the logical imagination, and Rami Malek himself certainly played his part in feeding those rumors at the time, in his typical cheeky manner.