It took two years of high-level negotiations to arrange a meeting with Daniel Craig. In an era when MI6 — the agency that employs his best-known character, James Bond — blithely advertises for agents on the Internet, Craig may well be the world’s most elusive pretend spy.
On the run: (from left) Daniel Craig with Bond girl Olga Kurylenko; the actor says he has gone for a leaner and meaner look for the film. Photographs: Karen Ballard
The long wait allowed plenty of time for disturbing rumours to marinate. For instance: He is surly and defensive, a reporter-averse utterer of combative monosyllables. Or this, from two women working on his publicity: He has more sexual magnetism than anyone we have ever met.
Perhaps nothing short of Craig’s materializing in his snug powder-blue bathing trunks from Casino Royale and offering to shake the martinis himself could have realistically lived up to all that anticipation.
But there he was in jeans, his arm in a sling from recent shoulder surgery. He was wearing a thick cardigan that, truth be told, walked a sensitive line between doofusy and stylish. He was, of course, unfairly attractive anyway, in his craggy, lived-in, blue-eyed way, but not so much as to render anyone speechless or unable to operate a notebook.
He was polite to a fault. He stood up when his publicist’s assistant brought in a cup of tea. He apologized several times for being 5 minutes late. He acted as if he were not sitting in a soulless conference room, which he was, and as if he had all day to chat about Bond and other interesting topics, which he didn’t (he had an hour).
Unlike many movie stars who come to believe the myth of their superiority, Craig, 40, tends to mock his own celebrityhood. Now that he is too famous to go to the movies without being recognized, he said, he might be forced to install a screening room at home. Not. “I could stick it next to the indoor swimming pool,” he said sarcastically.
Passing beneath two celebratory posters of himself as James Bond in his publicist’s office, he grimaced and muttered, “That’s my Dorian Gray portrait.” Asked whether he saw himself as a natural leading man, he said, “Fat chance.” And then, “There’s not a skincare product in the world that would have made that happen for me.”
When he was cast as Bond, filling the position most recently vacated by Pierce Brosnan, Craig did not seem like an obvious choice. He was an actor’s actor known for his intensity of focus and his wide range of challenging, counterintuitive roles. He has played, among other things, a sharp-lapelled pornography baron from Manchester in the BBC miniseries Our Friends in the North; a college professor pursued by a male stalker in Enduring Love; a builder sleeping with his girlfriend’s sexagenarian mother in The Mother; a drug-dealing businessman in Layer Cake; a killer full of murderous rage and heartbreaking tenderness in Infamous; and the poet Ted Hughes in Sylvia.