This being our first Secret Cinema experience, we had no idea, beyond the dressing up, what to expect. Being a Bond villain is not so dissimilar from teaching after all. Since early childhood, I have harboured not-so-secret dreams of being James Bond but really, deep down, I know my forte is creating plans, communicating them by pontificating in front of a big screen and then making people carry them out, whether they want to or not. Brinkworth took Zorin’s defunct company by the reins and turned it into one of the most successful tech giants in the world, specialising in digital optics (a more successful version of Google Glass).īond fans will of course recognise most of the contents of the preceding paragraph as being ripped off from the 1985 Roger Moore Bond classic (don’t even try to dispute it) A View To A Kill.Īs soon as Antony told me he had booked the Secret Cinema Casino Royale experience for my birthday, I knew I wanted to go as a villain. Zorin died plummeting off the Golden Gate Bridge – and his share price went with it. Judas Brinkworth made his millions by swallowing up the remains of Zorin Industries when it turned out its CEO and namesake, Max Zorin, was a megalomaniac supervillain hellbent on monopolising the microchip market by destroying Silicon Valley with a man-made earthquake. Instead, I am Judas Brinkworth, tech entrepreneur. Because tonight I am not David Lowbridge-Ellis, high school English teacher and school leader. I mean forgetting who I am supposed to be posing as. I don’t mean in an existential crisis sort of way. But the biggest mistake of all would be forgetting who I am.

I may even qualify my response, regaling him with the whole story of how I once taught an entire class of 24 A level students how to play poker (there was an educational reason, honest) in under 15 minutes.īut this would be a mistake, and not just because random strangers generally do not welcome being provided with masses of unnecessary detail in response to apparently simple and straightforward questions (I am still yet to learn this lesson).

My first thought is to be completely honest and say “yes, I know how to play and I’m OK at it actually”. “Can you play poker?” the stern-faced man, who looks curiously familiar, is asking me. All mobile phones are sealed into pouches as you enter so any photos from the interior are taken by Secret Cinema themselves. All images in this blog are taken by us except the three indicated.

Casino royale train scene script