Saunders is a fictional James Bond character in the film The Living Daylights. He is portrayed by Thomas Wheatley.

Thomas Wheatley as Saunders in ‘The Living Daylights’.

Film biography: He first appears as Bond’s companion as they attempt to arrange for General Georgi Koskov, whom they believe to be a high-profile Soviet defector, to escape to the West. When Bond refuses to kill the cellist Kara Milovy, whom Koskov was setting up as his “assassin”, Saunders threatens to charge him with insubordination.

Later, after Koskov arranges for his escape and Bond realizes that Koskov’s defection was actually faked, he has Saunders gather information on Milovy’s patron Brad Whitaker, who turned out to be Koskov’s accomplice, and produce a bogus British passport to enable her to travel with him.

After Bond and Saunders meet in a café in Vienna and Bond gets the intelligence and the passport, Saunders is killed when Whitaker’s henchman Necros detonates a bomb set in the mechanism of a sliding glass door, sending it smashing into Saunders.