Thunderball
Even though a stuntman (Bill Cummings) played the bad guy who ended up swimming with the sharks in Thunderball, Sean Connery had to perform a similar feat for an important underground fight scene in which he would do his own stunts. The sharks weren’t much danger, though, since they were sedated — or more. The one that looks as if it comes closest to getting a mouthful of Bond was actually a shark corpse pulled along by a crewmember offscreen.
And the peril of shark-swimming is just one example of the dangerous business of working with live animals for a James Bond movie. During the filming of You Only Live Twice, Donald Pleasence, playing the recurring villain Blofeld, had an unfortunate run-in with the character’s signature accessory: the movie’s scary explosions caused Blofeld’s Persian cat to pee on the actor.
One Bondian animal, though, was never seen by audiences: in a first draft of Dr. No, the titular doctor was supposed to be a monkey.