>> Bonds: dark, raffish, untouchable. The
Brosnan films tended toward the camp and
the fantastical, 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 $400m (£276m). Craig was a different
creature altogether: 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 satirised 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
9/11, the story offered a chance to refresh
the franchise, grounding it more strongly in
both the darker original 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 he was the wrong person.
The first time he went to the Eon offices, with
all the old posters on the walls, he convinced
himself it was just an exploratory 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.
Broccoli persisted. 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 he had
been let go. Craig continued to prevaricate.
When he is out of his depth, he can be surly
and difficult. “It was literally like, ‘Fuck off. I
don’t fucking want this. How dare you? How
dare you offer this to me?’” he said. “It’s just
ludicrous. But it was all defence.”
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 cufflinks. He puton 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 office, Broccoli knew he
wanted the part.Craig was a born show-off. Until his
parents broke up, when he was four,
they ran a pub, the Ring O’Bells, in
Frodsham, a market town in Cheshire,
in northwest England. As a toddler, Craig
would perform for the regulars, mimicking
comics he had seen on TV – Groucho Marx,
Laurel and Hardy. “I’d get money,” he said. “I
suppose 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 neighbourhood in Liverpool, where
she went to work as an art teacher. The “L7”
postcode of Liverpool, where Craig was a boy
in the 1970s, is associated, even now, with
poverty, violence and crime. “It’s rough. It’s
what she could afford,” he told me. “It waswhat 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 pro-
duction of Oliver! The part has a jolly, macabre
song. The audience 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.”
Craig got an O level in art, his mother’s
subject, and drifted out of school. About ten
years ago, he found out that Olivia had been
admitted to Rada 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 theatre, where he hung out backstage,
but he loved acting because it was his. “My
experience on stage 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
1980s, he went to a science fiction double
bill. “I’d never heard of this movie, Blade
Runner.” Craig watched the film, alone, with
a carton of Kia-Ora. 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 revela-
tory for me.”
In 1984, when he was 16, Craig auditioned
for the National Youth Theatre and moved
to London for the summer. A friend of his
father lent him a house on Ladbroke Road,
in Notting Hill. Craig performed, on and off,
with the National Youth Theatre for the next
six years while he went through drama school.
The theatre’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 theatre’s handyman. He painted
the offices. In 1991, Craig was cast to play a
racist South African soldier in The Power Of
One, a commercial and critical flop starring
Stephen Dorff. Craig was 23. He was paid
£18,000. “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 he would never earn
enough to owe any. (It took him five years to
pay off the bill.)
Going for auditions in London, Craig encoun-
tered 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, we had to
put a show on, and I can put a fucking show
on,” he said. Craig talks about acting the way
other people talk about jumping out of an
aeroplane. “I love that levelling. 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 off.” 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 control, to
be completely out of control. But yet you have
to be in control.”
In 1996, Craig made a breakthrough perfor-
mance appearing in Our Friends In The North,
the seminal BBC television series, playing a‘ I felt physically low.
The prospect of doing
another movie was off
the cards. That’s why
it has been five years’04-20-DanielCriagWithCopy_3481961.indd 158 11/02/2020 16:44
158 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2020