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 back lot
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 gray, 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 faked-up Cuban
alleyway in England on a dank autumnal night. He was
being paid $25 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 di≠erent. 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 everyone was pretty fried.
The director, Cary Fukunaga, had shot the movie’s end-
ing—the true farewell to Craig’s Bond—a few weeks ear-
lier. The last days were about collecting scenes that had
gotten lost or were flubbed in the previous, exhausting
seven months. It was just an accident of the schedule
that in his very final frames as Bond—a cinematic arche-
type that Craig transformed for the first time since the
’60s—he was in a tuxedo, disappearing into the 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 like 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 big-
ger 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 folk-
lore. 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 daughter 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 o∞ce, $1.1 billion, as Iron Man 3.
At the same time, they are weirdly artisanal, bound by
tradition, a certain way of doing things. The o∞ces of
Eon Productions, which makes the movies, are a short
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