In Elizabeth, Craig’s priest had to kill an informant on
the beach. The script said that he should strangle and
drown him in the surf. But Craig had another idea.
He moved the actor out of shot and pretended to dash
the man’s brains out with a rock. “I started smashing,”
Craig recalled. He carried on. He broke into a sweat.
“They went, ‘Cut!’ And the crew went, ‘Oh...okay!’”
Like he was a crazy person. Broccoli was transfixed.
In another shot of Craig, stalking through a church wear-
ing a long cassock, she saw Bond. “I just remember get-
ting chills all over my body,” she told me. “I just thought,
Oh, my God.”
Based on everything that had gone before, it didn’t
make sense to cast Craig as 007. At the time, Pierce
Brosnan had made four movies and was a direct descen-
dant of the previous Bonds: dark, ra∞sh, untouchable.
The Brosnan films tended toward the camp and the fan-
tastical, but so had many of the others. And they made
good money. In 2002, Die Another Day, which featured
Madonna as a fencing instructor and Brosnan kite-
surfing down a conspicuously CGI wave, cleared more
than $400 million. Craig was a di≠erent creature alto-
gether: a blond art-house thug.
But the Bond franchise in the early 2000s was in
a moment of uncertainty. In 1997, Austin Powers:
International Man of Mystery had satirized the movies
from head to foot, making it harder to play them for
laughs. On the morning of 9/11, Broccoli and Wilson
were in London, in a script meeting for Die Another
Day. It was too late to rewrite the movie, but they
sensed that it would be the last of its kind. “We felt the
world has changed and the nature of these films has to
change,” Broccoli told me. Two years earlier, after a long
legal battle, Eon and MGM Studios had obtained the
rights to Casino Royale, Ian Fleming’s first James Bond
novel, which was published in 1953. After September
11, the story o≠ered a chance to refresh the franchise,
grounding it more strongly in both the original, darker
tones of the novels and the new, worrying state of the
world. “It wasn’t just recasting the role,” Broccoli said.
“It was a new century and a new era. It felt like we had
to redefine.”
Craig was sure that he was the wrong person. The first
time he went to the Eon o∞ces, with all the old posters
on the walls, he convinced himself it was just an explor-
atory thing. “I was like, ‘This is what they do. They get
people in. They’re just feeling around,’” he said. “Plus,
Pierce was not leaving Bond, right?”
When it was clear that Broccoli was serious, Craig tried
to talk her out of it. “I remember saying to them early on,
‘I can’t do a Sean Connery impression. I can’t be Pierce,’”
he said. “I can’t do the kind of ‘Oh, well....’” Broccoli per-
sisted. Craig held out. He was 36. His film career was in
great shape. He didn’t want to say yes. He was terrified of
saying no. He had an image of his washed-up older self in
a pub, telling strangers that he could have been Bond. He
was also a private person. “I could be anonymous in the
world,” he said. “It was genuinely like, My life is going to
get fucked if I do this.”
In October 2004, Brosnan revealed that he had been
let go. Craig continued to prevaricate. When he is out of
his depth, he can be surly and di∞cult. “It was literally
like, ‘Fuck o≠. I don’t fucking want this. How dare you?
How dare you o≠er this to me?’” he said. “It’s just ludi-
crous. But it was all defense.”
He demanded to see a script of Casino Royale. It was
a good script. His objections were falling apart. One day,
on his way to another meeting at Eon, Craig put on a
dress shirt, but he couldn’t find any cu≠ links. He put
on a jacket, and his shirtsleeves stuck out. He left the
house. He went to a job interview for James Bond looking
like he’d gotten dressed in the dark. “I thought, Fuck it,
I’ll just let them hang down like that,” Craig told me. As
soon as he walked into the o∞ce, Broccoli knew that he
wanted the part.HE WAS A BORN SHOW-OFF. Until his parents broke up,
when Craig was four, they ran a pub, the Ring O’Bells,
in Frodsham, a market town in Cheshire, in North West
England. As a toddler, Craig would perform for the reg-
ulars, mimicking comics he had seen on TV—Groucho
Marx, Laurel and Hardy. “I’d get money,” he said. “I sup-
pose I’ve been making a living out of this from a very
early age.”
When his parents separated, Craig’s mother, Olivia,
moved him and his sister to a flat in an inner-city neigh-
borhood in Liverpool, where she went to work as an art
teacher. The L7 postcode of Liverpool, where Craig was a
boy in the ’70s, is associated, even now, with poverty, vio-
lence, and crime. “It’s rough. It’s what she could a≠ord,” he
told me. “It was what it was.” Olivia managed to get Craig
and his elder sister into a school in an affluent suburb, in
the north of the city. Each morning, she would drop them
there and make her way back to teach. “Walking home
from school was, you know, it was dicey,” Craig said. “I’m
not saying it was Brooklyn in the 1980s. But it was dicey.”
Craig was unhappy at school. He failed his exams.
He was bullied. He wasn’t a wimp—he played rugby, a
passion of his father’s—but he didn’t fit in. When Craig
was 14, a couple of friends put him forward to play
Mr. Sowerberry, an undertaker, in a school production
of Oliver! The part has a jolly, macabre song. The audi-
ence loved him. “I’m not saying it’s like the first time you
take really good drugs,” Craig said. “But it was a body
shock of emotion, of adrenaline, in a way that I’d never
felt before.”→
OPPOSITE PAGE
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OmegaCRAIG STUDIED
FOR THE PART OF
BOND. HE WENT
BACK TO THE IAN
FLEMING NOVELS
AND FOUND A
CHARACTER HE
COULD RELATE TO:
COLD, MESSED UP,
HUMAN.
54 GQ.COM APRIL 2020
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