Bond's world is getting more and more personal. Filming for No lime To Die lasted seven months, but her schedule was quite challenging: compared to Lashana Lynch, present from start to finish, de Armas had to take three months off to shoot another film.

AdA: It's like Paloma has changed shape during this time, just because it's been a long time since I started. I left and then I came back. Everything turns out: after three or six months I'm different too, so personal changes change the character, which grows with me.

To prepare for the many action scenes she trained for a long time, but not as much as she would have liked:

AdA: I had other commitments. I didn't have time. Maybe I underestimated how hard it is and how much energy it takes to shoot a film like this: you train three hours a day and spend 10 hours on set. The weapons are heavy and, as if that were not enough, I wear heels. A struggle! ([she] exclaims with a laugh.)

AdA: On the screen we can fake many things, but the force can't be simulated: you have it or you don't have it.

But nor was he, in fact, free: he was shooting the fourth and final season of Mr Robot in New York. Dates were jiggled, then re-jiggled, then re-jiggled again, until finally a couple of weeks were found right at the end of the Bond production schedule during which Malek could come to Pinewood Studios, just west of London, and film the bulk of his scenes.

“When someone tells me something’s a possibility, I just start to think, ‘Let’s make it work’,” says Malek, who is engaging and cheery in person, his eyes widening boyishly (because — whaddyaknow! — they can do that too). “I kind of just get laser-focused on it, especially when it excites me.”

Because Malek joined so late into the production of No Time to Die, there was no time for rehearsal. Malek had to head straight to set. “They were under time pressure,” he remembers. “I don’t know how much they loved the idea of fresh Rami coming in… Well, not so fresh, I was just finished on Mr Robot, but at the same time I’d been thinking about this all along.”

Craig, for one, seems to have been impressed. “I have a responsibility on these films,” he says. “All I want to do is make him feel as comfortable as it’s possible to be, for him to feel like he’s welcome, because it’s a huge machine and I don’t want it to feel overwhelming. There aren’t many films bigger than Bond, so I want to make sure that when someone like Rami walks onto set, he can hit the ground running. But he was ready. He was ready to go.”