Ed Sheeran Reacts to Losing James Bond Theme Song to Billie Eilish After He Already Started Writing It

The singer-songwriter says he had started writing a song for 'No Time To Die.'

Ed Sheeran admits that it didn't feel great to lose out to Billie Eilish when it came to writing and performing the theme song for the 2021 James Bond movie, No Time To Die.

Sheeran says that when Danny Boyle was in line to direct the film, he was approached to pen the movie's title track. However, when Cary Joji Fukunaga ultimately came on to direct No Time To Die, Eilish ended up with the gig.

"I was within a f**king gnat’s pube of doing one [a Bond theme song], and they changed directors, and then they just changed scripts and that was it. We’d done all the meetings, I started writing it,” Sheeran says on the latest episode of That Peter Crouch Podcast.

The British singer-songwriter confessed that writing a theme song for the James Bond film franchise is a career goal of his. "I'm not gonna pretend it didn't hurt not doing it," he said. "But if they came back I'd be like, 'Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah!'"

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The opportunity to write a song for a Bond movie was just as important to Eilish and her brother, Finneas O'Connell, who co-wrote the track with her. 

"It's hard to put into words how meaningful it is to us," O'Connell told ET ahead of the song's release in 2020.

"We're both huge fans of the franchise, of the Daniel Craig franchise specifically. I don't think there's a more iconic film and music sort of collaboration in the world than the theme songs to James Bond films. It was a lifelong dream of ours and I just feel crazy lucky that we've already gotten to be a part of this," he added. "It's insane."

No Time to Die was Craig's final film portraying the British spy. For more on the iconic movie franchise, check out the links below.

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