Craig Reflects on His Career and the Next Bond

Daniel Craig, busy promoting his new World War Two film Defiance, has offered reflections on his general approach to acting in recent interviews, but has inevitably been asked about his thoughts on the next Bond movie as well. Speaking in Beverly Hills to the Sunday Times, Craig also offered some intriguing thoughts on how his acting career has evolved and the Bond franchise might develop.

The interview, carried in the newspaper’s Culture section, emphasised that Craig ‘will never stop experimenting’.

Asked whether he decided to do Defiance because the part offered the opportunity to show a more sympathetic side of himself than Bond has become, Craig responded: “No, it’s always, ‘Does this story work?’ Everything falls in place around that. And, really, I try to keep it as instinctual as possible, because if you start thinking, ‘I must do a romantic comedy now, because I’ve just done a psychotic’, you’re stuffed. It would seem the antithesis of art”.

Craig also revealed his love of acting started as far back as he can remember. His mother used to take him to the theatre in Liverpool, where they lived: “I was just amazed that one minute people were on stage, then they would come off and be completely different. It was magic. And it obviously had a deep, deep effect on me”. His choice of parts has often been made on the basis of trying to avoid being typecast: “I want to be able to play anything”.

Turning to Bond, Craig admitted that the success of Quantum has been even more satisfying that that of Casino Royale, mainly because he was more involved than he has previously acknowledged in the development of the character and the plot. With Quantum, he took much more ownership of Bond and, in response to critics who have said Bond has become too dark, Craig said:  “Well, I nicked a lot of the ideas about who Bond is from Ian Fleming. But the point is, we did the the movie we had to do to finish the story off, and comedy and lightness weren’t relevant. This was a story about loyalty, about friendship, about who you can trust. Gag-writing wasn’t at the top of the list”.

Looking forward to the next Bond, Craig hinted that, having finished the story that began with Casino Royale, everything may be up for grabs in the next film, and the tone could be completely different: “I love the idea of putting Moneypenny in the film. I’m dead keen to do it. And Q”.

He also said he was “up for a submarine base, as long as the gag works”, but added: “The problem is that Austin Powers screwed everything up. He exploded the genre”.

In the meantime, Craig’s strong commitment to the role of 007 was very apparent to his co-stars on Defiance. Speaking to The Times, Jamie Bell has revealed that he caught Craig doing press-ups in a frozen Lithuanian forest after eight hours of filming! Bell said: “I think that, being James Bond, you have to put the work in”.

Defiance is based on the book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, written by Nechama Tec and published in 1993. The film version is directed by Ed Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai ). Craig plays the part of Tuvia, the leader of a group of Jewish partisans who managed to keep over 1,200 Jews alive and organised in the forests of Belarus, defying and attacking the Nazi invaders.