CONTINUED FROM PAGE 54
DANIEL CRAIG
Craig passed an art exam, his mother’s
subject, and drifted out of school. About 10
years ago, he found out that Olivia had been
admitted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art, Britain’s most prestigious acting school,
when she was 18 but didn’t attend. “There
was no money,” he said. “She couldn’t go.”
Olivia would take Craig and his sister to the
Liverpool Everyman, the city’s main theater,
where he hung out backstage, but he loved
acting because it was his. “My experience
onstage was mine,” he said. “It was the first
time in my life I had something that I could
claim as my own.”
Sometimes Craig stayed with his aunt,
who lived on the Wirral Peninsula, to the
west of the city. As a teenager, he haunted a
cheap cinema, in the seaside town of Hoylake,
next to the Irish Sea, where he was often the
only customer. “The movies used to arrive
late,” Craig said. “They were always terrible
prints. They were scratchy. But I sat in there
and watched movies.” One afternoon, in the
early ’80s, he went to a science-fiction dou-
ble bill. “I’d never heard of this movie Blade
Runner.” Craig watched the film, alone, with
a carton of Kia-Ora, a now defunct brand of
orange squash. He leaned forward in his seat,
rapt, mind blown, until the end credits rolled.
“I don’t think I took a sip. I just went, ‘That’s
what I want to do. That’s what I want to do. I
want to do that.’ And I didn’t know what that
was,” Craig said. “That was revelatory for me.”
In 1984, when he was 16, Craig audi-
tioned for the National Youth Theatre and
moved to London for the summer. A friend
of his father’s lent him a house on Ladbroke
Road, in Notting Hill. Craig performed, on
and o≠, with the National Youth Theatre
for the next six years while he went through
drama school. The theater’s director, Edward
Wilson, became a mentor. Wilson and his
partner, Brian Lee, a set designer, let Craig
look after their house. He became the the-
ater’s handyman. He painted the o∞ces. In
1991, Craig was cast to play a racist South
African soldier in The Power of One, a com-
mercial and critical flop starring Stephen
Dor≠. Craig was 23. He was paid 18,000
pounds. “Which was a fucking fortune.
I mean, a fortune,” Craig told me. “I spent
every single penny of it.” No one had ever
told him about taxes, assuming that he would
never earn enough to owe any. (It took him
five years to pay o≠ the bill.)
Going for auditions in London, Craig
encountered plenty of young actors who were
better educated or more comfortable in their
skin. But what he lacked in polish he made
up for in presence. “At the end of the day, wehad to put a show on, and I can put a fuck-
ing show on,” he said. Craig talks about act-
ing the way other people talk about jumping
out of an airplane. “I love that leveling. When
you’re standing backstage and you’re ready to
go on.... You’re all looking at each other, and
you’re all shitting yourselves. All bets are o≠.”
He can’t wait to be out there. “That’s the drug,”
he said. “It’s a place to be able to be out of con-
trol, to be completely out of control. But yet
you have to be in control.”
In 1996, Craig gave a breakthrough per-
formance on Our Friends in the North, a
seminal BBC television series, playing a
wheeler-dealer who ends up as a vagrant. Two
years later, he was in Love Is the Devil, an art-
house movie about the painter Francis Bacon,
playing the role of George Dyer, a burglar and
a lover of Bacon’s. Craig was naked and cov-
ered in paint for much of the time. “He was
laughing his head o≠,” John Maybury, the
director, told me. “He’s not afraid, and that is
unusual, because lots of actors are quite ter-
rified of misplacing their image or misplac-
ing their craft.” Maybury directed cult music
videos in the ’80s and ’90s. He recognized a
punk spirit in Craig, “a kind of underlying
panic.” Maybury couldn’t get enough of that
face onscreen. “Those icy-blue eyes,” he said.
“Part of you wants to trust him and wants to
believe in all of the nice-guy stu≠. But there
is something in those eyes that is quite psy-
chotic: the navy blue circle around the edge
of the blue.”
Love Is the Devil was a surprise hit.
Sam Mendes wanted to cast Craig as Paul
Newman’s unbalanced son in 2002’s Road to
Perdition, a big-budget Prohibition-era gang-
ster film. Craig played scenes with Newman
and Tom Hanks. He was on edge the whole
time. It came through in the performance.
“There was something very, very tightly
wound,” Mendes told me. “People talk a lot
about danger in performances, and truthfully,
it’s very rare. But Daniel always had that.”
When he heard that Craig had been chosen
to play Bond, a few years later, Mendes was
taken aback. “Bond was this sort of constant:
this eyebrow-raising, urbane, unflappable,
punch-line-delivering figure,” he said. “I
thought, ‘Daniel can’t do that. He’s completely
connected to his emotions.’ I thought he would
struggle with it.”AFTER CRAIG AGREED to play Bond, the stu-
dio insisted on a screen test. A ritual of the
franchise is that all potential Bonds are asked
to play the same scene, a moment in From
Russia With Love, in which the spy returns
to his hotel room to find Tatiana, a Russian
agent, waiting for him naked in bed. Craig
hated the rigmarole, the sense of following
tradition. “I can’t believe my own arrogance,
really,” he said. But he studied for the part.
He went back to Fleming’s novels and found
a character quite distinct from the unruffled
screen persona of the previous 30 years. The
Bond of the books was someone Craig could
relate to: cold, messed up, human. “He is
really fucking dark,” he said. In the novel
Moonraker (1955), Bond tips a load of speed
into his Champagne. “I think it’s more inter-
esting,” Craig told me. “I know we can’t have94 GQ.COM APRIL 2020
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 92
DABABY
found guilty of carrying a concealed weapon,
a misdemeanor. There were also other fights:
A local clout chaser heckled him at the Louis
Vuitton store in Charlotte, and DaBaby
appeared to knock him down in a video that
went viral.
His manager says DaBaby can’t speak
about any of his run-ins with the law, because
an arrest in one state was linked to a warrant
in another state, and all his legal issues knot
together. DaBaby says, “No comment...,” and
then a beat later decides he has something
to say. He seems more annoyed by it all than
anything else. “Me not commenting only
allows the false narratives to flourish and to
live on,” he begins, “but yeah, that’s bullshit.”
He pauses, then continues: “Those are false
accusations. The way that the story’s put out,
that’s not what really took place at all. I was
a victim of the situation, and that’s not me in
any of those videos that are out there. That is
not me. The entire police report is false, and
in due time the truth will surface the way that
it needs to surface.”
In the meantime, he’s keeping it moving.
The conversation eventually turns to another
topic: fatherhood. DaBaby became a dad
almost three years ago, and today his toddler
knows every one of his songs. “If it’s a new
song that she’s never heard before, she knows
it’s her daddy the second she hears it. She
knows!” he says exuberantly. She’s a happy
baby with a deep, raspy voice—one that she
also inherited from her father. He says father-
hood has made him more responsible, dili-
gent. “I was already a person who didn’t settle
for less. Now it’s like I’m not even settling for
the best. I need everything. I need her to have
everything,” he says. He’s making the kind of
music people want to hear, making videos that
rack up hundreds of millions of views, making
himself into a megastar. But if there’s a sug-
gestion that he’s just naturally adept at every-
thing and making whatever’s popular in our
current moment, here is what actually drives
DaBaby, according to DaBaby:
“You call me ugly, I’m going to show you
how pretty I am. You say I can only make this
type of song, I’m going to make this type of
song better than whoever. You can maybe say
that because people gravitate towards this so
much that they’re unaware of how exceptional
this is. I have to do this at the optimum level
because this is what people want right now.
This is what’s in demand,” he says.
“I love pushing the envelope. I love when
the odds are against me. I do.”
hunter harris is a writer living in
Brooklyn. This is her first story for gq.