Ed Sheeran nearly sang the No Time to Die theme instead of Billie Eilish: 'I had started writing it'

Turns out, Daniel Craig's final performance as James Bond was nearly set to a completely different soundtrack.

Ed Sheeran revealed that he came very close to writing and recording the theme song for the 2021 film No Time To Die but just missed out.

"I was within a f---ing gnat's pube of doing one," Sheeran said on Tuesday's episode of That Peter Crouch Podcast. "They changed directors, and then they just changed scripts, and that was it. But we had done all the meetings. I had started writing it."

Karwai Tang/WireImage; Momodu Mansaray/Getty Images Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish

The opportunity would instead go to Grammy-winning singer and wunderkind Billie Eilish, who released her soulful Bond single, "No Time to Die," ahead of the film in February 2020. Eilish went on to score not only a Grammy, but also a Golden Globe and an Oscar for the song, which she wrote with her older brother and frequent collaborator Finneas O'Connell.

While the timing might not have been right then, Sheeran noted that he's still very much on board to write another track should the opportunity come back around. "You've got to — eventually, as an English singer — want to do a Bond song," he said, adding, "I'm not gonna pretend it didn't hurt not doing it. If they come back, I'll be like, 'Yeah yeah, of course.'"

He's still got plenty of time to draft up some potential new spy-worthy hits, as James Bond franchise producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson told EW last month that they "haven't begun the hunt" for the next 007 yet.

"We're going to be sort of sitting down and trying to figure out where the Bond series is going to go, and we need to do that first, to get a sense of that, before we start casting for the role," Broccoli said at the time. "So we'll start thinking about that sometime next year."

Sheeran has contributed multiple songs to film and television throughout his prolific career. Not only did he pen and perform the 2013 hit "I See Fire" for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but he also made a cameo singing in front of a campfire in Game of Thrones.

So will Bond be his next foray into film? Only time will tell.

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