Nicolas Cage Plays Dusko Popov, Bond's Serbian Model
The trailer for Fortitude shows Cage as a Yugoslav playboy and double agent whose career, producers claim, helped shape James Bond himself.
In the trailer released on September 2, Nicolas Cage orders a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred, a line the entire world recognizes as James Bond’s calling card. Except in this scene, he isn’t playing Bond. He’s playing the man Bond was, at least in part, built on: Dusko Popov, the Yugoslav double agent whose career, according to the film’s producers, gave Ian Fleming one of his models for the most famous British spy of all.
The film is called “Fortitude,” and it follows Operation Fortitude, the deception British intelligence engineered ahead of the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944. The story centers on officers Dudley Clarke and Thomas Argyll “Tar” Robertson, who built a network of double agents and a phantom army, complete with fake tanks, planes, ships, extras playing soldiers, and radio traffic all designed to convince Hitler’s command that the invasion was coming somewhere else entirely.
Simon West directs from a script by Simon Afram, who also produces. Principal photography ran 37 days, from September 8 to October 26 last year, in London, and the project was first announced back in May 2025, produced by Op-Fortitude as a British film.
Was Popov really the model for Bond?
The claim that Popov was one of Bond’s real-life models isn’t new, but in this case it’s worth looking at how it’s actually phrased outside the wire reports. FirstShowing.net, one of the first outlets to run the trailer, describes Cage’s character as “the real-life spy who apparently was the real inspiration for James Bond,” hedging with “apparently.” That single word says more than the whole marketing push: the link between the real Popov and Fleming’s character has long been part of film and literary folklore, but Fleming himself never confirmed it as the sole or primary source, which leaves the film free to present the claim as fact whenever it suits the marketing.
What the trailer makes clear right away is that “Fortitude” is not shy about its cast, to the point where the ensemble starts to become its own selling point, separate from the story. Ed Skrein plays Dudley Clarke, Matthew Goode is Thomas Argyll Robertson, Michael Sheen plays Winston Churchill, and Art Malik plays Ian Fleming, alongside Ben Kingsley, Ron Perlman, and Alice Eve. Jordi Molla plays Juan Pujol, the Spanish poultry farmer who became a double agent in his own right, and Paul Anderson takes on Bernard Montgomery. When a cast list carries that many recognizable names, the question isn’t whether the actors can carry a scene, it’s whether the script has room to give all of them one.
That same FirstShowing.net piece admits it isn’t sure whether the mix of action thriller and comedy the trailer hints at actually works as either. West, whose credits include action titles like “Con Air” and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” has a track record of letting tone slide from serious into playful, but balancing historical material against light humor is always the most fragile part of a project like this, and the vodka martini scene looks very much like the film’s own way of signaling that it knows it.
The story around the film has, in the meantime, picked up a plot of its own outside the cinema: in June this year, a hard drive holding an unencrypted master copy of the film went missing from Netflix’s offices in Los Angeles, after which Afram sued Netflix for $105 million, claiming the company had jeopardized the film’s sales and its planned awards campaign. “I’ve put seven years of my life into bringing this incredible true story to the screen… But this film was never just mine. It belongs to an extraordinary cast and their dream roles, which deserve to be seen and recognized. It represents a moment these artists earned,” Afram wrote in the lawsuit against Netflix.
Whether the story of Popov, a man who really existed and about whom, unlike the fictional Bond, surprisingly little is known outside a narrow circle of intelligence historians, gets a film that treats his biography as more than a catchy line on a poster remains to be seen. The trailer promises fun and an older, gentlemanly style of spy film, backed by serious acting firepower. Whether it actually delivers won’t be clear until an exact theatrical release date is announced, and none has been set so far.
