walk from Buckingham Palace. The theme tune hasn’t
changed for half a century. The stunts are largely real.
The scripts are a nightmare. There is a slightly demonic,
British conviction that it will all work out in the end.
“There has always been an element that Bond has been
on the wing and a prayer,” Sam Mendes, who directed
two of Craig’s 007 movies, told me. “It is not a particu-
larly healthy way to work.” Reckoning with any of this
doesn’t actually help if you’re the frontman. Craig has
spent a lot of his time as James Bond trying not to think
at all. While making No Time To Die, he taped some inter-
views with Broccoli and Wilson about his years in the
role. There was a lot that he simply couldn’t remember.
“Stop fucking thinking and just fucking act,” Craig said
once, like it was an incantation. “It’s almost that. Because
so many things are going on in your head. I mean, if
you start thinking...that’s it. You’ve got to sort of forget.
You’ve got to leave your ego.”
All of which means, now that it’s coming to an end,
Craig sometimes struggles to comprehend what has hap-
pened to him and what he has achieved. When I spent
time with him this winter, Craig was warm and voluble
in the extreme. He talked a mile a minute, losing threads
and finding others. He apologized when answering my
questions almost as often as he swore. Onscreen, Craig’s
face—that beautiful boxer’s face, those gas-ring eyes—can
have a worrying stillness while his body moves. In real
life, everything about Craig is animated, part-sprung. It’s
as if he wants to occupy several spots in the room at once.
He self-deprecates a lot. During one long conversation,
when I told him that he had managed to imbue a pre-
viously vacant character with an inner life, a sense of
mortality, and an unquenchable feeling of loss—in short,
that he had triumphed as Bond—Craig initially misun-
derstood what I meant. When he realized, he spluttered
apologetically for a while. “What you’re saying, it’s like,
if I say it...” He hesitated. He couldn’t bear to brag. But
he also knew. “It’s raised the bar,” Craig finally conceded.
“It’s fucking raised the bar.”
After the last shot at Pinewood, Craig posed with
Fukunaga for a picture. His bow tie was wonky. They
both looked shattered. “Typically I’m not an emotional
person on sets,” Fukunaga told me. “But there was a sort
of pulsing feeling to that day.” The night shoot wrapped
ahead of schedule, and the production crew—many of
the day team had stayed on to see Craig’s final bow—
gathered next to the set. Fukunaga gave a short speech.
Craig struggled through his. Since having a daughter
with his wife, Rachel Weisz, in 2018, he has often found
himself on the edge of tears. (Craig also has an adult
daughter from an earlier marriage.) “I had a whole thing
kind of put together in my head that I wanted to say,” he
recalled. “I couldn’t get it out.”
Craig’s stunt double was in tears. Broccoli and Wilson
looked on. “We knew it was a monumental moment,”
Broccoli said. “There wasn’t a dry eye, to be honest.” A
crowd went back to Craig’s trailer. He drank Campari-
and-tonics and made negronis for everyone else. “I was
a mess,” Broccoli said. “I was a complete and utter mess.”
On set, the crew hung around. “It’s night shooting—
everybody usually runs o≠,” Wilson told me. “And they
just were talking with each other and shaking hands.
And it was as if they knew it had to end, but they didn’t
like the idea.”
The producers were reminiscing a few weeks later
in a hotel in Lower Manhattan. It was early December.
That morning, Craig and the other stars of No Time To
Die—Léa Seydoux, Rami Malek, and Lashana Lynch—had
appeared on Good Morning America to launch the trailer.
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