Royal Navy warship HMS Dragon set to make a starring role in new James Bond film No Time To Die

Daniel Craig’s hotly-anticipated blockbuster, No Time To Die, is set to hit cinema screens later this month.

The adrenaline-fuelled spy thriller had been due to be released in April 2020 but was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, with the film just weeks away from its long-awaited premier, producers have released the final trailer – which features a starring role by HMS Dragon.

The Portsmouth-based Type 45 warship, filmed in secret before the pandemic began, can be see briefly in the clip.

In the UK version, the £1bn guided-missile destroyer is shown floating at sea. While in the American clip for the latest Bond flick, she can be seen firing missiles into the sky.

The MoD did not disclose how much it had received financially to allow HMS Dragon to feature in No Time To Die.

An MoD spokesman added that ‘no weapons were fired during the filming’. suggesting the scenes were created using special effects.

No Time To Die, features Craig in his fifth and final outing as famed naval Commander, 007.

It takes place after the capture of villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played by Christoph Waltz, with Bond no longer in active service.

The final trailer sees the pair come to face to face again, as Blofeld tells him: ‘Now your enemy is my enemy. How did that happen?’

Bond replies: ‘Well, you live long enough…’

Bond and love interest Madeleine Swann, played by Lea Seydoux, ran off together at the end of 2015’s Spectre and had been living off the grid but things appear to have gone sour in their romance.

In the footage, Bond is told: ‘She still loves you, did you know that?’

The couple come face to face as she warns him: ‘You don’t know what this is?’

Naomie Harris’s Moneypenny asks him: ‘Is she one of them?’ to which Bond replies: ‘I don’t know her at all.’

As footage shows Swann meeting Rami Malek’s villain Safin, a voice says: ‘If her secret finds its way out, it will be the death of him.’

The trailer also shows Bond being visited by Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) to call him back into action, as the CIA man tells him: ‘It’s harder to tell the good from bad, villains from heroes, these days.’

The trailer also features Lashana Lynch as the new OO, Nomi, whom Bond brands ‘a disarming young woman’.

It shows the pair in the cockpit of a plane, with Bond asking: ‘Have you ever flown one of these things before?,’ to which she replies: ‘Nope,’ before it shoots off into the sky.

The trailer ends with Ben Whishaw’s Q pleading: ‘Can I just have one nice evening, please, before the world explodes?’ as Bond is seen throwing a grenade into a gunfight.

No Time To Die will be released in UK cinemas on September 30, two days after its Albert Hall premiere.

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