One Of The Best James Bond Villains Ever Guest Starred On Gilligan's Island

You never could tell who was going to drop by "Gilligan's Island" during its three-season run in the mid-1960s. Actually, that's not entirely true. Frank Sinatra? He was way too big a name to mess with a silly network sitcom. Lyndon B. Johnson? The Texas lion of a politician did not have the temperament for that type of tomfoolery. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? Lou Gehrig? The great Iron Horse of the New York Yankees was notoriously camera shy and dead.

For the most part, the famous people who turned up on that uncharted patch of land in the Pacific were then mid-level comedy celebrities like Phil Silvers, Don Rickles, and Larry Storch. Kurt Russell was easily the biggest movie star to ever set foot on the island, but he was just a precocious teenager at that point in his career. Numerous, soon-to-be-well-known character actors did have a penchant for stopping by the show, though, and one of them wound up being a real pain in the keister for Roger Moore's James Bond in the 1970s. Indeed, he was a spy on "Gilligan's Island" before he tried to kill the spy who loved Barbara Bach.

In the season 2 episode "Ghost a Go-Go," Richard Keil, best known as the metal-toothed menace Jaws in the sublime "The Spy Who Loved Me" and the sublimely silly "Moonraker" (and one of /Film's favorite Bond villains), haunted the castaways as a ghost who did spooky things like throwing Mr. Howell's fake polo pony up in a tree. (Why they didn't immediately surmise they'd been invaded by teenage vandals is a mystery to me.) The gang eventually discovers that the ghost is a Russian agent who's trying to chase them off the island in order to snag its oil rights. The castaways eventually devise a clever plan to scare Kiel back into the water, which yet again leaves them stuck without hope of returning to civilization.

Kiel wasn't a complete unknown when he appeared on "Gilligan's Island" — that is, if you count starring as the titular character in the Arch Hall, Sr. horror film "Eegah" as being "known." He went on to appear in three episodes of "The Wild Wild West" and book some film work before landing something of a breakout part in Robert Aldrich's prison football classic "The Longest Yard." From there, he found his way to Jaws and the Bond franchise, which turned him into an instantly identifiable hulk of a character actor. Kiel worked steadily throughout the 1980s in a variety of films and television shows, but he would always be Jaws first and foremost. And he might've never been Jaws had he not tried to scare the wits out of the castaways on "Gilligan's Island."