It started with a funeral. On 21 April 2004,
Mary Selway, a celebrated London casting
director, died of cancer. Selway had helped
Craig land some important early roles; she had
also told him what to do. Craig isn’t exactly a
submissive person. He left home as a teenager
and never looked back. “My mother would
hate me saying this, but I was on my own,”
Craig said. In his twenties and thirties, he was
self-reliant to a fault. “The idea that people
supported me... at the time, I couldn’t see it.
It was ‘I’m on my own. I do my own thing.’”
Craig was at the airport, on his way to India,
when one of Selway’s daughters called. She
asked him to help carry the coffin. He was
taken aback. “It was a wake-up,” he said. “It
was like, ‘Oh, right. People care.’”
Selway’s funeral was at St James’s Piccadilly,
a broad, light-filled church in the West End of
London. The British acting world was present.
Barbara Broccoli was in charge. If you have
an image of Broccoli as some old lady in a
Rolls-Royce, discard it now. Broccoli was 43
at the time. She has long brown hair and a
mid-Atlantic accent and you do what she says.
“There’s a very slim chance that the daugh-
ter of one of the great commercial producers
of the last 100 years should also be a great,
great producer, but that is in fact the case,”
Mendes told me. Broccoli and Craig met for
the first time at the wake. She asked him to
come and see her.
Broccoli had been tracking Craig as the next
Bond for the previous six years. In 1998,
Craig played a psychopathic priest in Cate
Blanchett’s Elizabeth. His character was an
assassin, dispatched by Rome to kill the Queen.
The role suited Craig down to the ground:
a damaged, dangerous young man. He has
always been interested in portraying violence
on the screen. “I always thought it was more
violent when you saw within the person,” he
told me. “The shock. It’s like Pacino shooting
the cop in Godfather. He does it and Pacino’s
face... he’s never shot someone before.” In
Elizabeth, Craig’s priest had to kill an inform-
ant on the beach. The script said that he should
strangle and drown him in the surf. But Craig
had another idea. He moved the actor out of
shot and pretended to dash the man’s brains
out with a rock. “I started smashing,” Craig
recalled. He carried on. He broke into a sweat.
“They went, ‘Cut!’ And the crew went, ‘Oh...
OK!’” Like he was a crazy person. Broccoli was
transfixed. In another shot of Craig, stalking
through a church wearing a long cassock, she
saw Bond. “I just remember getting chills all
over my body,” she told me. “I just thought,
‘Oh, my God.’”
Based on everything that had gone before, it
didn’t make sense to cast Craig as 007. At the
time, Pierce Brosnan had made four movies
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