While histories of cinema, especially US cinema, typically discuss the development of the star system, only in recent decades has much attention been paid to actors as performers, and still less attention is given to actors as cult performers. As Wade Jennings observes, compared to regular stardom, “Cult stardom is a relatively recent phenomenon,” and one that, “over time … can emerge as a quite different phenomenon” (90). Exploring the discourses related to this “different phenomenon,” Matt Hills notes how, “across their lifetime, some cult stars become hemmed in by their most famous roles (where a specific character has taken on a cult following, or been linked to a cult text)” (28). For example, while William Shatner was “recast” from his TV image, he, like other cult figures, continued “to be shadowed by his cult identification with Captain Kirk” (28). Meanwhile, as Hills offers, Harrison Ford's Hollywood career, “as a ‘mainstream’ star,” has undermined his “cult status despite his multiple appearances in cult movies such as Blade Runner,” because Ford's performance always “connotes conventions of Hollywood acting, being discursively linked to ‘mainstream’ cinema” (31–33). There are, in fact, few international stars like Ford who have shifted their focus from mainstream, even blockbuster films, to cult or non–mainstream works that have resulted in a problematic persona that successfully challenges audience expectations.

One star who deviated from the expected and challenged those “performance codes” at a relatively early stage in his career—and did so perhaps most spectacularly within the realm of sf—is Sean Connery.

Fifty years and multiple James Bond films later, while much debate continues as to who is the best Bond, for many Sean Connery is Bond, the star who helped to create the franchise. To John Cork and Bruce Scivally, the initial Bond/Connery appeal focused on teenage boys who found “007 [to be] everything an adolescent male dreams of becoming:…