DANIEL CRAIG CONTINUED
and world-destroying maniacs—all under the
pressure of movie-release dates set years in
advance. It hasn’t always worked. Quantum
of Solace, Craig’s second Bond film, begins
moments after the action ends in Casino
Royale but quickly collapses into a zany plot
about Bolivian water resources. “We didn’t
have a script,” Craig conceded. “So we concen-
trated a lot on the stunts.”
He found his great collaborator in Sam
Mendes. It was Craig’s idea to approach the
director. Mendes said yes because of Craig.
“He was the reason I did it,” Mendes told me.
“I got re-interested in the franchise because
of Casino Royale.” Like Craig, he was drawn
to the idea of Bond’s mortality and an uncer-
tainty about Britain’s 21st-century status. In
Skyfall, the first of Mendes’s Bond movies
with Craig, Javier Bardem, playing the cyber-
terrorist villain, says: “England, the empire,
MI6—you’re living in a ruin.... You just don’t
know it yet.”
The relationship between Bond and
Britain—or Britain’s male imagination, at
least—has never been totally straightfor-
ward. The movies are mainly about escape:
The world is endangered, then saved by a
man in a dinner jacket. But both Mendes and
Craig were concerned with making the fran-
chise at least correspond to the world that
it departs from. (Skyfall and Spectre were
inspired by Julian Assange and the Edward
Snowden NSA disclosures, respectively.) In
Skyfall, Mendes told me that he was anxious
to correct the “kind of nostalgic, jingoistic,
pre–Cold War idea of what Britain was,” rep-
resented by the classic films. “It felt right
that it was Daniel,” Mendes said, “because he
seemed like a contemporary Bond and like
a realist, like a person who actually walked
on the street.”
During our conversations, Craig didn’t
want to talk much about real-world a≠airs.
Not because he isn’t engaged (Craig opposed
Brexit and, as a U.S. citizen, has given money
to support Bernie Sanders), but because once
you start, it’s hard to talk about anything
else. “We struggled to keep Trump out of this
film,” Craig told me of No Time To Die. “But of
course it is there. It’s always there, whether
it’s Trump, or whether it’s Brexit, or whether
it’s Russian influence on elections or what-
ever.” Like many Britons who have left home—
Craig and Weisz are based in New York—he
is baffled by the country’s seemingly inward
turn since 2016. “There are British people
working in the top industries in the world
and at the top of those industries. We do that,
and we are good at that. And somehow we’re
kind of breaking all that apart,” he told me.
“Whether that’s breaking from Europe....
There is a sort of nihilism, isn’t there?”
It is a stretch, but Craig sometimes sees
Bond as an avatar for a kind of selfless public
service that doesn’t seem to hold in our pop-
ulist, polarized moment. “There’s something
I feel that Bond represents, someone who’s
there, trying to do the job and doesn’t want
any fucking publicity,” he said. “And this is a
joke, because he drives a fucking Aston Martin
and does all these ridiculous things. But these
people exist.... It’s the ambulance service. I
know it’s terribly kind of romantic. But they
are people who are just getting on with it
and saving people’s lives.” He despairs of the
grandstanding of Trump and Boris Johnson
and the generalized hysteria of social media—
the absence of a certain adult indi≠erence.
“But that’s not the way the world works now,”
Craig said. “It’s about humiliating others to
save one’s own skin. And it’s cowardly, it’s just
fucking cowardly.”MAKING HIS FIRST two Bond films, Craig
experienced, at times, a su≠ocating sense of
responsibility. When he accepted the part, he
had insisted on having a say in the creative
process, but this sometimes left him feel-
ing like he had to control everything. With
Mendes, Craig found he could relax. “He
reminded me that my job was to act,” he said.
“It loosened me. It took the rod out of my arse,
whatever.” He began to experiment, playing
with the script and adding other flourishes.
On set, Mendes witnessed an actor wres-
tling with one of the most familiar, and hack-
neyed, characters in celluloid history. For
some reason, he came to think of Craig as one
of those slightly frightening guys at a pro-
test, wearing a T-shirt despite the cold, dec-
orated in tattoos, telling everyone they are
not extreme enough. “That’s Daniel. That’s
actually who he is,” Mendes said. “The truth
is, there is something wounded and hurt
about him.” Shooting Skyfall, Craig confided
that he was trying to play Bond as if he were
burning up. “Really no other actor would
have attempted to play Bond in that way,”
the director told me. “That sense in which
he is incendiary.” And it is by that arduous
road that Craig discovered his own version
of the old Bond swagger. In the film’s open-
ing sequence, Bond is chasing an enemy on
a Turkish train. He rips o≠ the roof of the
train with a mechanical digger and drops
into a crowded carriage. His suit is dusty and
smeared with blood. He straightens his cu≠s.
Craig added the gesture mid-stunt. “It
wasn’t in the script,” he told me. “I realized
why that came in, why he did it: Because
he’s scared. He’s fucking terrified. He’s just
jumped o≠ the back of the train. He’s just
like, ‘Everything’s fine.’” The moment is
pure Bond, yet di≠erently so. Craig’s Bond
isn’t detached from the moment; he is
fully immersed, holding himself together.
“Otherwise he’s just shooting his fucking
cu≠,” Craig said. “Isn’t he cool? He’s not cool.
He’s really not cool at that point.” When I
mentioned the cu≠s to Mendes, he remem-
bered the improvisation straightaway.
“Because it has come from inside,” he said.
“Anyone else doing that, it would have been a
cliché, and somehow he manages to make it
real.” And that is Craig’s art. “It’s very di∞cult
to achieve,” Mendes said. “Finding a way to
reimagine those things so they feel real again.
It takes unbelievable willpower to do that.”
Skyfall made a billion dollars. It also had a
solid script. Craig’s tough times as Bond have
come on the movies that never quite came
together, where scenes and dialogue and plot
twists were being written and rewritten on
the fly. Since Casino Royale, there has been
a lot of attention paid to Craig’s body and
physical preparation for the films. At times
he worked out relentlessly because he hadnothing else to go on. “I’ve got to do some-
thing,” Craig said. When we met this winter,
Knives Out, in which Craig plays an eccentric
gentleman detective, was in the cinemas. For
the part, he had practiced a Southern accent
and played with an ornate screenplay by Rian
Johnson, the director, for several months.
“You’re learning the script, and it gets into
you like that,” Craig said. “With Bond, you
don’t get the script, so the physicality of it is
a preparation, in a way. It’s making my head
go, ‘This is what it’s going to be.’” Trying to
inhabit a cipher, in a plotless blockbuster,
with the world’s eyes upon you, is like living
out a very particular anxiety dream. “I have
su≠ered from it in the past,” Craig told me.
“I have su≠ered because it’s been like, ‘I can’t
cope, I can’t deal with this.’”
His body has taken the brunt. On Quantum
of Solace, Craig tore the labrum—the con-
necting cartilage—in his right shoulder
during a stunt in a plunging aircraft. Thenhe bashed it again, jumping through a
window in Italy and crashing into a wall.
“I was just nervous and overcooked it,” he
said. “At that point, my arm was kind of use-
less.” Early in the filming of Skyfall, Craig
ruptured both his calf muscles, meaning that
he had to undergo rehab in a swimming pool
during the shoot. “It’s not about recovery,
because you know you can recover,” he told
me. “It’s about psychologically thinking that
you’re going to do it again.”
Over the years, Craig has caught himself
swaying, 60 feet in the air, wondering what
the hell he is doing. He burned out on Spectre.
In March 2015, he blew his anterior cruciate
ligament—heard it go boink—while fighting
with Dave Bautista, a former professional
wrestler, on the set of a train at Pinewood. “I
was like, ‘Dave, throw me, for Christ’s sake....’
Because he was being light with me,” Craig
said. “So he threw me, and God bless him, he
just left my knee over there.” Craig spent the
rest of the shoot wearing a bulky knee brace,
which was disguised during the edit. “That
was a drag,” he said.
It was also why, when Craig was asked in
an interview two days after filming ended
whether he would make a fifth Bond movie,
he said that he would prefer to smash the glass
he was drinking from and slash his wrists.
Craig has never been comfortable selling
Bond. “You’re front and center while filming,
and then they tell you to go and sell the movie.
Literally, you’re standing in a crowd of people,”
he said. “And suddenly they’ve all pushed you
forward. And they’re like, ‘Go on!’ It’s really
disconcerting. And you think you’re responsi-
ble. And actually, of course, you are.” Mendes
has long sympathized with Craig, who is notCraig was more involved in
the writing of No Time
To Die than in other Bond
films. “This is my last
movie,” he said. “I’ve kept
my mouth shut before...and
I’ve regretted that I did.”