The star reveals the moment when he decided to kill Bond — and why he’s foxing fans again playing a gay detective in the Knives Out sequel. It’s the new Agatha Christie says director Rian Johnson.
Daniel Craig remembers the exact moment he decided to kill off James Bond. It came within days of unleashing on the world his rough, tough vision of Ian Fleming’s secret agent in 2006.
“I was driving away from the Berlin premiere of Casino Royale with Barbara Broccoli,” he says. “I had genuinely thought I would do one Bond movie, then it would be over. But by then we knew we had a hit on our hands. I realised the enormity of it, so I said to Barbara, ‘How many more? Three? Four?’ She said, ‘Four!’ I said, ‘OK. Then can I kill him off?’ She said, ‘Yes.’”
Fast-forward 15 years to No Time to Die, the 25th Bond film and Craig’s fifth. “I said, ‘This is it. I don’t want to do any more.’” But why would anyone want to kill off the character that made them a superstar?
“If we kill Bond, we can begin again,” Craig says. He means a reset for himself and for the series. “I think Barbara thought that too. But, bless them, the studio, MGM, were, like, ‘What are you talking about? Are you out of your minds?’ There was reluctance. So we had to do it in secret, really.”
No Time to Die ended with the culture shock of the decade — 007 was blown up on an island. Craig formed the scene in his head and says it was tricky to get right. Even his dark rendition of Bond was not bleak enough for the spy’s suicide, so they had to play it as sacrifice. Craig asked Phoebe Waller-Bridge — on writing duties — to “sprinkle magic dust” over the script and she made it a poignant end; Bond is infected with nanobots, a biological weapon that spreads like a virus, which means he can never again touch his loved ones, Dr Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) and their daughter.
“Real tragedy is when you have absolutely no choice,” Craig says. “We had to find a way to make his death no choice. It was the happiest Bond had ever been because he’d found exactly what he was looking for. Like everyone on Earth, he was just looking for love.”
He smiles, unburdened after telling a tale kept secret for years. Craig, 54, is here in London, having travelled from New York, where he lives with his wife, Rachel Weisz, and their four-year-old daughter. His blue eyes sparkle. Off screen, he is looser company than people think: huge laugh; long, thoughtful answers. It feels as if he has been liberated. After 15 years as the most serious of 007s, he played Macbeth on Broadway and now is up for something wilder — the sequel to the 2019 comic whodunnit Knives Out.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery has Craig returning as the faintly ludicrous detective Benoit Blanc. The film is the second in a series inspired by Agatha Christie that teams A-listers with a snappy script and a plot that twists and turns. It takes place in Greece, where the tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) invites his wealthy friends to a murder mystery party — then an actual murder takes place. Blanc, who speaks with a slow, Southern drawl, is the man to solve it.
The guests are “disruptors” — people who shake up an industry. Does Craig empathise? After all, he did disrupt Bond by killing him. “Yes,” he says, with a mix of reticence and thrill. “I came in guns blazing and everyone got angry. ‘His ears stick out! He’s blond! Blue eyes!’ I’m hardly the tall, dark stranger Fleming wrote, but I thought, ‘We have to make it new.’ We can’t just go, ‘Here, audience, here’s the same old stuff we always did.’
“I know that sounds massively arrogant,” he bellows. “But it was a creative disruption. I felt Bond was big and tough enough to take just about anything. If I’d ended up doing more [Bond], I really would have pushed it.” Blimey. “But Bond can take it! It is not fragile. It’s robust. Sean Connery personified that character in a way that will never go away, so I thought, ‘What do I do to it?’ "
No wonder he likes Knives Out, a team game compared with the single-bloody-mindedness of Bond.
Its writer and director, Rian Johnson, says casting was like writing a guest list for a dinner party. “The best you can do are world-class actors who aren’t assholes,” he says. Glass Onion’s superb line-up includes Kate Hudson and Janelle Monáe. (The first starred Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis and Toni Collette.)
The point of the shoot and the film is to have fun. “That’s it, man,” Johnson says. Still, politics creeps in. There is satire about sweatshops and the super-rich, and headlines have been made by a scene that reveals Blanc is gay. “It just made sense to Daniel and me,” Johnson says. “We didn’t want to be coy or cute about it. We just wanted it to be a fact of the character.”
When making films, Craig adds, “You are supposed to reflect life. And that [gay] relationship reflects people in my life. It’s normal. But we don’t make a song and dance out of it. It just feels right.”
A third film with Craig is planned and, like its predecessors, will be rated 12 or 12A — this is fun for the whole family. “Ultimately, all this stems from memories of watching Agatha Christie adaptations as a kid,’ Johnson says. “Watching with my family, feeling this is the most fun a movie can be.”
That is why Netflix has paid an astonishing £385 million ($738 million) for instalments two and three of Craig’s new franchise — this may not be Bond, but it’s still lucrative. “I want to do true crowd-pleasers in the murder mystery mode,” the director says. “I want the movies to feel like rollercoasters, not crossword puzzles. There are things you have to pay attention to, but I hope I layer that into grand entertainment.”
Craig agrees. “We shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously all the time. I grew up watching panto — we laughed about the madness of a politician or some star.” Norton’s idiotic character Bron is rather like Elon Musk. “Dotcom billionaires are laughable,” Craig says. “I want to make people laugh — it’s cathartic. Or else we’re screwed. And to make art is a political act, but I don’t want to ram things down throats. I am a political animal, but don’t want to thrust it in my work. I don’t think that’s my job.”
Craig and Johnson are having a ball with Knives Out and audiences are lapping it up. Over the long Thanksgiving weekend in the US, when Glass Onion opened in cinemas before its Netflix debut, the film took about £11 million ($21 million) — far above expectations.
It is a hit and a breath of fresh air for Johnson in particular. He directed Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), which, depending on who you speak to, is either the best Star Wars or the worst. It was certainly bold. So is Johnson a disruptor too? “No,” he says. “With something I love as much as that, I didn’t think of turning it on its head. I wanted to make it alive and vital. My goal was to evoke the terror The Empire Strikes Back made me feel as a kid.”
Some Star Wars fans did not like it. “I’ve read about this.” So will there be a Knives Out backlash by, say, the fourth film? “We’ll find out,” Johnson says. “The only way you can really go wrong is by being afraid and doing something that feels repetitive because you’re trying to come up with what fans are expecting. Audiences can smell stale bullshit.”
Craig has wanted to act since he was a child. In Liverpool, his mum, Carol, took him to the theatre and they often met her friends backstage. He remembers watching “weird, wonderful” films on Channel 4 as a teenager and sneaking into the cinema. He fell in love with the stage and screen, but it has always been about the acting for him.
When he was ten he went to the library to read a Steve McQueen biography because he thought the film Papillon was “the best thing ever”. “I remember thinking, ‘This is bullshit.’” he says. “Everyone was talking like they knew McQueen, but they didn’t. They couldn’t. I don’t want to know the mechanics of movie-making, I just want to enjoy the movie. I know that’s idealistic, but just enjoy the magic.”
But what about the distractions of fame and money? “You have to keep that in mind, otherwise you lose your shit. I have great sympathy for people who lose it in the business because if people say, ‘You’re great,’ eventually the wheels fall off. One of the good things about being successful is that you don’t have to work as much. You only work because you want to. So you’re still doing what you set out to do.”
We finish with vodka, Belvedere Vodka, the drink Craig flogs in the recent viral advert in which he dances round Paris in a tight-fitting vest. At the end he sighs “Finally”, which, of course, people are interpreting as finally being free from Bond.
“When I read the script, I thought, ‘Hmm, really?’ " he says. “Then I thought, ‘Let’s go with it. I hope people get the gag.’ " So vodka and Knives Out were not a big plan for a post-Bond Craig? “There was no meeting with my agents,” he says, laughing. He puts on an outrageous American accent: “‘OK. What are we going to do? An advert. You’re going to dance.’ I wish life worked like that, but it doesn’t.” He smiles. “When I did it, I thought of my nana. She was the voice in my head, saying, ‘Mutton dressed as lamb.’”
When Craig started as Bond, he carefully chose the roles he took in his break years to shake up his image. In 2008 he was naked in Flashbacks of a Fool and he played a Belarusian Jew in Defiance. Why did he feel the need to do that? “I felt I had to prove I was still an actor — that Bond wasn’t acting. When, in fact, Bond was one of the hardest jobs I’ve had. Eventually I went, ‘F*** this, I am just this thing. That’s OK.’”
It’s time to put my theory to Craig; that by bringing in people such as the director Sam Mendes and killing off 007, he made the series more serious and brought “acting” to Bond. Craig guffaws. He even does a little clap. “You f***ing write that down.” He is still cackling. “That’s made my day. Let’s end it there.”
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is on Netflix on December 23
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
