I n the early Noughties, Toby Stephens was a leading man with the Royal Shakespeare Company . Then came his breakthrough screen role: a North Korean general transmogrified into a swashbuckling insomniac English billionaire with a union jack parachute. Maybe not the most likely choice for today’s aspiring thespians – and as Stephens admits, it felt eccentric at the time. Imagine casting a Bond villain like that now. “You’d never get away with that, would you?” he says of Die Another Day ’s race-swap conceit. The son of acting royalty Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, he wasn’t even top of MGM’s list; that was Sean Penn . But eventually he landed the role of Gustav Graves, having initially been led into an oak-panelled room at EON’s Piccadilly offices and handed a page of dialogue. “Right,” he remembers asking. “Do you want me to do it in a Korean accent?” They did not.…