>> 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 con-
centrated 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, their first Bond movie together, Javier
Bardem, playing the cyberterrorist 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 straightforward. The movies
are mainly about escape: the world is endan-
gered, then saved by a man in a dinner jacket.
But both Mendes and Craig were concerned
with making the franchise at least correspond
to the world from which it departs. (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”, represented
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 affairs. Not
because he isn’t engaged (Craig opposed Brexit
and, as a US citizen, gave money to 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 whatever.” 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 indus-
tries. 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 break-
ing 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, polarised 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 generalised hysteria of social media- the absence of a certain adult indifference.
“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 suffocating
sense of responsibility. When he
accepted the part, he had insisted on having
a say in the creative process, but this some-
times left him feeling 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 wrestling
with one of the most familiar, and hackneyed,
characters in celluloid history. For some
reason, he came to think of Craig as one of
those slightly frightening guys at a protest,
wearing a T-shirt despite the cold, decorated 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 some-
thing 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 also discovered
his own version of the old Bond swagger. In
the film’s opening sequence, Bond is chasing
an enemy on a Turkish train. He rips off 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 cuffs.
Craig added the gesture mid-stunt. “It wasn’t
in the script,” he told me. “I realised why that
came in, why he did it: because he’s scared.
He’s fucking terrified. He’s just jumped off the
back of the train. He’s just like, ‘Everything’s‘ Daniel let us in, which
makes the moments
he shuts us out
even more arresting’
PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGEfine.’” The moment is pure Bond, yet differ-
ently so. Craig’s Bond isn’t detached from the
moment; he is fully immersed, holding himself
together. “Otherwise he’s just shooting his
fucking cuff,” Craig said. “Isn’t he cool? He’s
not cool. He’s really not cool at that point.”
When I mentioned the cuffs to Mendes, he
remembered 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 dif-
ficult 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 more than a billion dollars.
It also had a solid script. Craig’s tough times
as Bond were on the movies that never
quite came together, where scenes and dia-
logues 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 had nothing else to go on. “I’ve
got to do something,” 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 practised
a Southern accent and played with an ornate
screenplay by Rian Johnson, also the direc-
tor, 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 plot-
less blockbuster, with the world’s eyes upon
you, is like living out a very particular anxiety
dream. “I have suffered from it in the past,”
Craig told me. “I have suffered 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. Then he
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 useless.” 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 psy-
chologically 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 lig-
ament – heard it go boink – while fighting >>DANIEL CRAIG04-20-DanielCriagWithCopy_3481961.indd 166 11/02/2020 16:48
166 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2020