Roger Moore Remembers His James Bond Costar Richard Kiel

Former James Bond, Roger Moore paid tribute to his recently departed on-screen nemesis — and off-screen pal — Richard Kiel a.k.a. Jaws in a new interview.

The two tangled in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me and 1979’s Moonraker and remained friendly for decades after Moore turned in his license to kill and Kiel retired the steel teeth, which were so painful to wear, he was only able to keep them in his mouth for about 35 seconds per take.  

“It came as a hell of a shock,” Moore says of Kiel’s passing. “I’m still in a state of not quite believing it. We were talking a week ago [on] a radio program reunion.” (The exact cause of death remains undisclosed.) Moore characterizes the 74-year-old, 7’2” actor as “absolutely marvelous,” praising his warmth and willingness to help out whenever he was needed, such as when he helped promote Moore’s fundraising campaigns for UNICEF. “He was a big, caring man.”  

Hear Roger Moore's interview below....

In the interview, Moore also reveals that it was Kiel’s formidable presence as Jaws that encouraged producers to bring him back for another movie, rather than letting him join the ranks of the one-off Bond bad guys. “They shot two endings [for The Spy Who Loved Me] one where the shark got him and the other one where he got the shark. They wanted him to see the film with an ordinary audience. And, in America, there was great whooping and hollering when his head came up out of the sea.” Of course, besides Kiel’s performance, one of the reasons for all that “whooping and hollering” is that audiences in that post-Jaws era probably loved the in-joke of Bond’s Jaws battling — and beating — a Spielbergian shark.

Kiel himself had spoken about his character’s longevity in a 2009 interview picked up by The Hollywood Reporter. “I had convinced the producer that Jaws should have some characteristics that were human to counteract the steel teeth. I guess I overdid it — I became too likable to kill off!” he said. The goodwill carried over into Moonraker, which opens with Jaws shoving Moore’s Bond out of an airplane. Later on, the two do battle atop a cable car on Brazil’s Sugarloaf Mountain, with the sizable assassin using his metal chompers to bite though the cable holding the cars up in the air. (Fortunately, the cable was made of a pleasantly chewy substance —licorice.) Moonraker also gave the normally mute and loveless Jaws his first girlfriend and his first and only line — “Well, here’s to us.” “He was the villain everyone wanted to see return,” Moore tells Yahoo. “He was a well-loved character and very well-defined. We didn’t have any big dialogue scenes, because he didn’t speak until the last line of the second film. But his reactions and everything else were always perfect.”