Shortly before midnight, on a damp Friday
last October, Daniel Craig shot his last scene as
James Bond. It was a chase sequence, outside,
on the backlot of Pinewood Studios, just west
of London. The set was a Havana streetscape- Cadillacs and neon. The scene would have
been filmed in the Caribbean in the spring if
Craig hadn’t ruptured his ankle ligaments and
had to undergo surgery. He was 37 and blond
when he was cast as the world’s most famous
spy, in 2005. He is 51 now, his hair is dirty
grey and he feels twinges of arthritis. “You
get tighter and tighter,” Craig told me recently.
“And then you just don’t bounce.”
So there he was, being chased down a fake
Cuban alleyway in England on a dank autum-
nal night. He was being paid £19 million. It
was what it was. Every Bond shoot is its own
version of chaos and the making of No Time
To Die, Craig’s fifth and final film in the role,
was no different. The first director, Danny
Boyle, quit. Craig got injured. A set exploded.
“It feels like, ‘How the fuck are we going
to do this?’” Craig said. “And somehow you
do.” About 300 people were working on the
final stretch of filming at Pinewood and eve-
ryone was pretty fried. The director, Cary
Fukunaga, had shot the movie’s ending – the
true farewell to Craig’s Bond – a few weeks
earlier. The last days were about collecting
scenes that were lost or flubbed in the previ-
ous, exhausting seven months. It was just an
accident of the schedule that in his very final
frames as Bond – a cinematic archetype that
Craig transformed for the first time since the
1960s – he was in a tuxedo, disappearing into
billion (£680m), as Iron Man 3. At the same
time, they are weirdly artisanal, bound by
tradition, a certain way of doing things. The
offices of Eon Productions, which makes
the movies, are a short walk from Buckingham
Palace. The opening 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 particularly healthy way to work.”
Reckoning with any of this doesn’t actu-
ally 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 interviews 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 com-
prehend what has happened to him and what
he has achieved. When I spent time with
him last winter, Craig was warm and voluble
in the extreme. He talked a mile a minute,
losing threads and finding others. He apolo-
gised when answering my questions almost
as often as he swore. On screen, 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 con-
versation, when I told him he had managed
to imbue a previously 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
misunderstood what I meant. When he real-
ised, 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 sort of a
pulsing feeling to that day.” The night shoot
wrapped ahead of schedule and the produc-
tion 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. >>
‘ It wasn’t justrecasting the role.It was a newcentury and era.
We had to redefine’
BARBARA BROCCOLIthe night. The cameras rolled and Craig ran.
That bulky, desperate run. “There was smoke,”
he said, “and it was like, ‘Bye. See you. I’m
checking out.’”
Craig isn’t the type to linger on moments
such as these. For the most part, he blocks
them out. “You can ignore these things in life
or you can sort of... It’s like family history, isn’t
it?” he told me. “The story kind of gets bigger
and bigger. I feel a bit like that with movie
sets: this legend builds up.” Bond is fraught
with legends already. More men have walked
on the moon than have played the part and
Craig has been Bond for the longest of all – 14
years. (Sean Connery did two comeback gigs,
but his main spell lasted only five.) The films
are also, insanely, a family business, which
only intensifies the sense of folklore. Albert
“Cubby” Broccoli made Dr No, the first film in
the franchise, in 1962. Fifty-eight years and
25 movies later, the producers are his daugh-
ter, Barbara Broccoli, and stepson, Michael G
Wilson, who began his Bond career on the set
of Goldfinger, in 1964.
The films go toe-to-toe with Marvel: Craig’s
Skyfall did around the same box office, $1.1DANIEL CRAIG04-20-DanielCriagWithCopy_3481961.indd 152 11/02/2020 16:41
152 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2020