The Walther P5: James Bond’s Other Pistol

It Wasn't Always About the Walther PPK

Click to listen to the audio version of this article.

James Bond and the Walther PPK. They are an iconic pairing that has been around since the first Bond movie, Dr. No, premiered in 1962 and starring Sean Connery. Of course, Bond used other weapons at different times, but his go-to sidearm was always the compact and somehow elegant PPK. He switched to the more modern Walther P99 for a few movies in the 1990s, but in Daniel Craig’s second appearance as Bond, he was back to carrying the PPK, most of the time.

But did you know that in the 1980s, two competing Bond movies were released in the same year, and they were both pushing a new, ultramodern handgun on the most famous spy in the world? 

Bond’s Walther PPK 

Here’s a fun fact: In the first Bond movie, Dr. No, while the dialog says Bond is carrying a .32 ACP PPK, the gun used in the film is actually the larger Walther PP pistol. Some fuss is made about Bond switching to the Walther early in the movie — M actually orders him to hand over his Beretta M1934, saying it’s underpowered and that it would be Bond’s undoing because it had jammed on him recently and almost got him killed. 

This is kind of funny, since the Beretta was chambered in the substantially more powerful .380 ACP, or if we’re talking in European gun terms, the 9mm Corto. So how did they get this wrong? It’s actually an error leftover from adapting Ian Fleming’s novel to a script for the movies. 

In the novel, Bond used to carry a different Beretta pistol chambered in .25 ACP, which is, indeed, less powerful than the .32. 

So, in the movie, they’re talking about a PPK in .32 ACP replacing a .25 ACP Beretta, but they actually show a Walther PP in .380 ACP replacing a Beretta Model 1934 in .380 ACP. Got that? 

Well, they got it right in subsequent movies, and Bond is actually carrying a PPK from then on. 

1983: The Year Of The Bond Box Office Showdown

Sean Connery, the original Bond, turned in his tux and PPK in 1971 after appearing as 007 in Diamonds Are Forever for what everyone thought was the last time. This appearance was actually a comeback after Connery had been replaced in the role for one film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). That movie was supposed to serve as a sort of reboot before the term had been invented, with newcomer George Lazenby stepping into the lead. 

Lazenby was a little-known Australian actor who didn’t take to the new role well — he quit before the movie even premiered. 

They got Connery to come back for one more go before he turned over the reins to Roger Moore, who played Bond for seven films beginning with Live and Let Die (1973). Through all this, Bond carried a Walther PPK. 

In 1983, Moore was starring in his second-to-last Bond film, Octopussy. But, there was a competitor at the box office. 

Back in 1958, Ian Fleming wrote a script with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham that went unfinished at the time. It was never made, but Fleming later turned the script into his novel Thunderball. That novel was then turned into a movie by the same name in 1965 starring Connery. 

When the novel was published, McClory and Whittingham sued and in the settlement, they were awarded the film rights to Thunderball, which it licensed to MGM/UA for 10 years.

But when that license expired in the 1980s, McClory got the film rights back and wanted to make another movie out of Thunderball. Somehow, he got the movie rolling and got Sean Connery to come back to the role of Bond more than a decade after he’d last played him, in a remake of a movie he’d already starred in. He was old enough that they had to work the fact into the script. 

The film was released as a non-Eon canon Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983), the same year that Eon was releasing Octopussy starring Moore. McClory tried to cash in again in the 1990s with another remake of Thunderball to compete against the revived canon series now starring Pierce Brosnan, but MGM shut him down in court. 

While the filmmakers were going to have to battle over profits, Walther wasn’t going to be left out, no matter who was playing James Bond. That year, the gunmaker was debuting a brand new handgun, the Walther P5. 

Bonds New Pistol: The Walther P5?

The gun was first produced in 1977 and was made in hopes that it would be adopted by German police who were looking to upgrade their older .380 ACP pistols to modern semi-auto 9mm handguns. The Walther P5 went up against the SIG Sauer P225 and the Heckler & Koch P7. 

By accounts, the P5 was a solid pistol that performed well, but it never became very successful in Europe or anywhere else, mostly because of price. It didn’t do anything dramatically better than its contemporaries, but it was expensive to produce, which meant the per-unit price was always higher than SIG’s. 

The Bond movies of 1983 were Walther’s chance to introduce the P5 to a world audience and hopefully get some momentum going by making it the new handgun of James Bond. 

The P5 is an SA/DA recoil-operated, locked breech, 9mm semi-auto that is largely based on the legendary Walther P38. The barrel is a non-tilt design that actually moves straight back during recoil, which increases accuracy. 

While the regular P5 has a sort of futuristic look — sort of like a cross between the P38 and the PP, while also being pretty non-descript. The compact version looked a whole lot like a PP, and the long barrel version, the P5 Lang, looked a whole lot like a P38. One weird quirk of the gun is that it ejected spent brass to the left of the breech rather than the right.  

Bond Switches To The Walther P99 & Back Again

So, in 1983, both Roger Moore and Sean Connery used the Walther P5 pistol as James Bond in two competing films. Both films wanted to stay in the good grace of Walther, and it’s certain the makers of Never Say Never Again felt incorporating a Walther lent more legitimacy to their second remake of Thunderball.  

But, the P5 didn’t make any more of a splash in the movies than it did in the gun world. Connery fired it twice in his film, and that’s about it. If the audience wasn’t super keyed in, they likely didn’t even notice it was a different gun. They were probably too busy looking at Connery’s oddly dark wig. 

In Octopussy, Moore uses the P5 and loses it in India, but then later refers to the gun as his PPK when telling Q about it. Not a great product placement. 

Connery never played Bond again, and Moore again carried the PPK in his last Bond film, A View to a Kill (1985) before turning the role over to Timothy Dalton for the rest of the 1980s. Dalton also carried a PPK for his two turns as Bond.

The public went six years without a Bond movie until Brosnan revived the character in Goldeneye (1995), sticking with the aging PPK. The movie was a big hit and Bond was officially back. 

The sequel came in 1997, and Walther again tried to goose its newest pistol by putting it in a Bond movie. This time, it worked. 

Brosnan starts off carrying a PPK in Tomorrow Never Dies, but switches to a striker-fired Walther P99 in Saigon when he chooses one from Wai Lin’s (Michelle Yeoh) super cool secret weapon stash. He then uses it through the entire third act of the movie, with and without a suppressor. 

The P99 was also heavily featured in promotional materials for the movie and even got onto the official movie poster. The switch had been made, and Bond had been brought into the modern era of handguns. Brosnan used the P99 as Bond for the rest of his run as the character — two more movies including The World is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002). 

When Daniel Craig took over the revamped Bond series in 2006 with Casino Royale, he was also using the established P99. But the ol’ PPK got some screen time — Bond uses it during the pre-title fight sequence in the bathroom, and to score his first kill allowing him to become a 007 agent. 

For the next film, Quantum of Solace (2008), Craig switched back to the PPK, for no explained reason. He continued to carry the aging handgun for his three remaining Bond movies, Skyfall (2012), Spectre (2015), and No Time to Die (2021).