If the latest reports are to be believed, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is getting measured for his dinner jacket and learning how to handle a Walther PPK as he prepares to be cast as James Bond.

The Nowhere Boy and Kick-Ass star, 33, is hotly fancied to take over from Daniel Craig as MI6’s most famous secret agent in the 26th Bond film. “Bond is Aaron’s job, should he wish to accept it,” an anonymous source told The Sun in London. “The formal offer is on the table and they are waiting to hear back.”

Taylor-Johnson, for his part, has had to contend with such rumours for years and always plays a straight bat. “I find it charming and wonderful that people see me in that role,” he said in an interview last week. “I take it as a great compliment.”

Becoming Bond would cap a remarkable rise for Taylor-Johnson, who started acting in advertisements when he was aged six and first trod the boards in London’s West End aged eight. The actor, who was then just plain old Aaron Johnson, burst onto the screen playing a young John Lennon in Nowhere Boy, a biopic of the young John Lennon. More famous than the film is the romance it sparked between its lead, who was then 18, and Sam Taylor-Wood, the director who is 23 years his senior. Exactly one year later, he proposed to her and changed his name.

Taylor-Johnson’s lifestyle is not very 007. When he is not shooting films, he lives with his wife and their four daughters – Wylda, 13, and Romy, 11, as well as those from his wife’s first marriage to art dealer Jay Jopling, Angelica, 25, and Jessie, 17 – on a farm near Bruton, Somerset. The village has been dubbed the “new Notting Hill” for its celebrity residents which include the likes of Stella McCartney, Sir Cameron Mackintosh and George Osborne.

In the occasional interviews he gives, the actor raves about his love of nature and appears more interested in his vegetable patch than accumulating a fleet of Aston Martins or a collection of Omega watches. “I grew up with a very poor diet. Only later in life did I enjoy cooking and I love the ingredients,” he told Harper’s Bazaar last month. “They’ve got to be fresh and organic. I have a vegetable garden and I’m going to add some chickens for fresh eggs.”

His produce includes kale and pumpkins, while he also keeps chickens, two pigs, a pair of cows and bees. “That’s what I love doing,” he said. “I have pigs. I have bees!” When tending to his hives, he does not wear a beekeeping suit or use smoke to control them. “Luckily, I haven’t been stung,” he said. “They’re pretty calm. I stay calm, and they can read that energy.”

Taylor-Johnson rises by 6am each day and does up to 20 minutes of meditation before an hour-long workout. He then makes breakfast for his children and does the school run. Acting, the job that has made him a millionaire, appears to bore him. “It doesn’t feed my soul,” he once said. “I enjoy the normality of things, the everyday stuff. Getting my kids ready in the mornings, taking them to school and activities – that’s plenty. That feeds my soul.”