No Time To Die star Daniel Craig’s rocky road from ridicule to respect as the best James Bond ever
Daniel Craig will farewell James Bond as the longest serving actor and many say best in the coveted role – but it hasn’t always been plain sailing.
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When the new James Bond film No Time To Die finally has its world premiere in London next week, it will mark the end of a very long, and sometimes bumpy, journey for Daniel Craig.
The eagerly-anticipated, long-awaited and much-delayed blockbuster is the UK actor’s fifth and final outing as Ian Fleming’s super-spy with a licence to kill and all indications are that he will leave the 59-year-old franchise with reputation intact as the longest serving and one of the greatest – if not the greatest – incarnations of the beloved character.
But it wasn’t always that way. It’s hard to believe now after 15 years as 007, but Craig’s initial welcome to the role was frosty at best and downright hostile at worst. In a new documentary that looks back on Craig’s tenure, Being James Bond, longtime producer Barbara Broccoli reveals that the moment she saw him as a robed assassin in the period drama Elizabeth, she knew she’d found the man to take over from Pierce Brosnan in the coveted role.
The general public, however, was not so sure. Initially there was a feeling of “Daniel, who?” for an actor who mostly done character and supporting roles in movies such as Road To Perdition and Munich, or acclaimed leads in smaller films including Layer Cake and Mother. Parts of the hardcore fan base fired up with one of the early internet pile-ons through the website blondnotbond.com, taking at issue at his hair colour, (which was clearly at odds with the Fleming’s description in the original books) and a sometimes hostile media seemed be willing his debut film, Casino Royale, to fail.
But in life, as in Bond’s character, revenge is sweet and Casino Royale was a critical and commercial hit, becoming the highest earning film in the franchise to that point and almost universal acclaim for Craig’s gritty interpretation that dragged Bond into the modern era after some of the absurd and over-the-top excesses of the late Brosnan era. As part of the global promotional campaign, Craig made a whirlwind trip to Sydney and as he gazed out at the Opera House from his five-star hotel room, gave the impression of a man who was delighted to be there. He was warm and friendly as he tried to make sense of his good fortune, while discussing his mutual admiration society with Nicole Kidman, secret geeky side and desire to appear in a Star Trek movie. But he also admitted that he was stung by the unfairness of the criticism.
‘‘I was affected by it, yes, of course I was,’’ he said at the time. ‘‘You know, I work very hard at what I do and I think sometimes I actually do a kind of a half decent job. ‘‘What bothered me was that normally I premiere a movie and the following day there are reviews. Some of them are bad and some of them are good and I take them as they come. But I hadn’t actually presented the work. See the movie and then you have every right to criticise or do what you want. But see the movie.”
The contrast in demeanour could have hardly have been greater on the set of his next film, the troubled Quantum of Solace. Deep in the Atacama Desert in Chile, it was a courteous and professional but rather serious and stony-faced Craig who greeted journalists from around the world midway through the production. Granted, he was juggling his attention between serious stunt work in the searing heat and the attention of the media, but when one writer had the temerity to ask him about his rumoured engagement to then girlfriend Satsuki Mitchell, his ice-blue eyes fixed her with a withering stare far deadlier than his alter-ego’s trusty Walther PPK pistol. In hindsight it’s become clear that despite brave faces all around, all was not well with QoS, which is now regarded as the weakest of his efforts as Bond, although it’s not as bad as many make it out to be. The follow-up to the record-breaking Casino Royale coincided with a Hollywood writer’s strike, meaning that filming started without a complete script and the production never quite recovered.
“The movie kind of works,” recalls Craig in the Being James Bond documentary. It’s not Casino Royale, and that was always going to be … It was like, literally, troubling second album syndrome.”
Craig was also doing it tough: his success as Bond had made him a global megastar and he admits now that he simply wasn’t ready for the attention and he was “physically and mentally under siege”. He credits Hugh Jackman, with whom he appeared in the Broadway play A Steady Rain in 2009, for helping him to come to terms with and appreciate fame and fan interactions.
“My personal life was affected by being that famous all of a sudden,” he says in the same documentary. I used to lock myself in and close the curtains, I was in cloud cuckoo land.”
Craig’s third effort as 007 put the mission back on track as Skyfall became the first in the franchise to crack the $1 billion dollar mark, thanks to some inspired directing from Oscar-winner Sam Mendes, a villain for the ages in Javier Bardem’s Silva, Dame Judi Dench’s touching swan song as M and Adele’s Grammy-winning theme song.
Its sequel Spectre, with Mendes once again behind the camera, was more of a classic Bond film with gadgets, quips and the reintroduction of franchise ubervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld. It was not quite as beloved, but still scored with fans and made a more than respectable US$880 million at the box office. It also seemed like it might be the end of the line for Craig. While he’d suffered injuries on previous films (shoulder cartilage on QoS and calf muscles on Spectre) as a result of wanting to do as many of his stunts as possible, he badly damaged his anterior cruciate ligament in a fight with former professional wrestler Dave Bautista and had to soldier in pain for the rest of the shoot.
The film had so worn him down that while promoting it in 2015 he came out with this infamous quote when asked whether he’d be back for more.
“Now?,” he told Time Out magazine, “I’d rather break this glass and slash my wrists. No, not at the moment. Not at all. That’s fine. I’m over it at the moment. We’re done. All I want to do is move on.”
As a result, the six years between Spectre and No Time To Die is the second longest gap between entries into the 25 (official) films of the franchise. For producers Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, coaxing Craig back for one last hurrah was the first priority.
“He’s been really important and key to the whole thing,” says Wilson. “He’s a great actor and he really immersed himself in the part – he changed himself physically, he worked out, he focused on being Bond and I think he redefined Bond for the modern age. He has always been involved in interpreting Bond in the scripts and his Bond I think stands up as one of the best. Some people think he is the best.”
But there were plenty of hurdles to come, even before the Covid-19 pandemic forced the release date to be pushed back by more than year. Oscar-winner Danny Boyle was tapped to direct the then-untitled film but left after “creative differences”.
Boyle and Craig had worked together on a James Bond segment featuring the Queen for the 2012 London Olympics, but it’s believed disagreements over the script he had written with long-time collaborator John Hodge led to his departure.
Boyle was replaced for the coming film by Cary Joji Fukunaga, whose credits include the acclaimed first series of the HBO drama True Detective, as well as the Netflix series Maniac. At Craig’s request, Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller Bridge was brought in to polish the script, and he relished the chance to give the character a fitting farewell and finish the way he began, with a warts and all portrayal of a cold-blooded killer.
“I started it like that with Casino,” begins Craig. “That was how we went in and that was a lot of what defined the way I have played this wonderful character. I wanted Bond to look like a killer and I wanted him to behave like a killer because that’s what he is, an assassin; that’s what he was written as. But I wanted a modern take on that.”
The world has also changed since 2015 and the creators had to consider what the hard-drinking, womanising, character once described as “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur” might look like in the #MeToo era. No Time To Die starts five years after the events of Spectre, with Bond being coaxed out of retirement to save the world again, and his 007 number having been reassigned to Lashana Lynch’s new character, Nomi.
“Bond has had to evolve just like all you other men, fortunately,” says Broccoli. “I am a big champion of MeToo and I think it has impacted the world thankfully and I think that everything we do has to reflect the new world we live in.”
Craig, who is now married to Oscar-winning actor Rachel Weisz, with whom he has a young daughter, is finally ready to move on from Her Majesty’s Secret Service and already has another hit franchise on the go thanks to the runaway success of murder mystery Knives Out, in which he plays southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc. And despite the bruises and beatings, he’s leaving on a high as he revealed in a teary video on the final day of filming No Time To Die.
“I’ve loved every single second of these movies, and especially this one because I’ve gotten up every morning and I’ve had the chance to work with you guys,” he says. “And that has been one of the greatest honours of my life.”
Being James Bond is now showing on the Apple TV app. No Time To Die opens in Australian cinemas on November 11..
007: FROM BEST TO WORST
1 Daniel Craig
Craig’s no-nonsense reading of the character was exactly what the series needed after the invisible cars and iceberg surfing of the big-earning, but dopey Die Another Day and the parody of the Austin Powers films. His blend of charm, thuggery, amorality and borderline misogyny is arguably the closest anyone has come to Fleming’s books – and the fact that he looked smoking hot in Speedos didn’t do him any harm either.
2 Sean Connery
The original and many say the best, Connery runs a very close second to Craig, even if Fleming was originally cool on the Scottish former milkman and labourer. Connery appeared in six movies, which included some of the best in the series, such as Goldfinger and From Russia With Love, and created the prototype superspy for all his successors to beat.
3 Pierce Brosnan
Originally offered the role in 1985 on Moore’s retirement, but unable to accept it due to contractual obligations on his hit TV show Remington Steele, Irishman Brosnan had to wait almost a decade to make his debut in GoldenEye. Brosnan helped drag the series into the modern, post-Soviet-era, displaying some of Moore’s lighthearted charm without the cheese and hints of the emotional turmoil beneath the polished veneer.
4 Roger Moore
The longest-serving Bond, the oh-so-English Moore brought a playfulness and humour to the character as well as an ever-arching eyebrow that should have had its own agent. His first few movies, which included Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me, weren’t bad, but the rot set in with the dreadful Moonraker and he should have been cashing in his government pension long before he had to drag his creaky old bones around the Golden Gate Bridge in The Living Daylights.
5 Timothy Dalton
When Welsh Shakespearean stage actor Dalton took over the role from Moore (having turned it down when Connery retired because he was too young), it marked a more realistic, less fantastic approach to the character and the films. His second, and last film, the dark, violent and vengeful Licence To Kill, saw Bond going rogue, but proved to be one of the least successful chapters in the franchise and he wasn’t asked back.
6 George Lazenby
As an actor, Aussie George Lazenby made an excellent model – his biggest claim to fame had been a series of chocolate ads. Connery was always going to be a hard act to follow and while Lazenby had the physical presence, his clunky delivery and silly costume changes in what was otherwise a good movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, ensured he was a one-Bond wonder.
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