Ed Sheeran reveals he lost the 'No Time to Die' theme song to Billie Eilish: 'I'm not gonna pretend it didn't hurt'

• Ed Sheeran revealed on "The Peter Crouch Podcast" that he was very close to doing a James Bond song.
• He said he'd begun writing the song for "No Time to Die" but after its original director dropped out, he lost the job.

Not only did the most recent James Bond movie, "No Time to Die," have a different director at first, but also a different artist set to perform its theme song.

Ed Sheeran revealed on the latest episode of "The Peter Crouch Podcast" that he was initially supposed to write the theme song to "No Time to Die."

The topic came up when the retired English soccer player asked Sheeran if he'd ever been asked to do a Bond song before.

"I was within a fucking gnat's pube of doing one," Sheeran said at the 41:34 mark of the podcast. "They changed directors, and then they just changed scripts, and that was it."

"But we had done all the meetings," he continued. "I had started writing it."

Crouch then asked if he would ever do it again if asked.

"Yeah, of course. I'm not gonna pretend it didn't hurt not doing it, but yeah I would," Sheeran answered. "If they came back I'd be like, 'Yeah, of course.'"

Originally, the 25th James Bond movie was to be directed by Danny Boyle, but he exited the project in 2018 over "creative differences."

It seems, according to Sheeran, with the exit of Boyle, his fate was set.

Cary Joji Fukunaga came on board to direct the movie and later Billie Eilish was announced as the artist performing the movie's theme song. Eilish was 17 years old at the time she recorded the song, which made her the youngest artist ever to make a Bond song.

The "No Time to Die" song, which Eilish cowrote with her brother Finneas O'Connell, went on to win a Grammy and an Oscar.