Craig on cover of ST culture mag

With the new James Bond film SPECTRE due to hit UK cinema screens later this month, a detailed tie-in interview with 007 star Daniel Craig has been published in the ‘Culture’ section of the Sunday Times (October 4th).

Interestingly, at one point in the interview, Craig revealed that he had took some inspiration for his interpretation of 007 from Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones adventure film series.

Adorned with a cover photo showing Daniel in a blue sweater pulled up over his lower face, with him staring directly back at the camera, the newspaper’s ‘Culture’ magazine proclaimed ‘Old blue eyes is back’, subtitling the piece with ‘Daniel Craig on doing Bond his way’.

Daniel talked to the newspaper’s Jonathan Dean, who noted that – despite all the early hostility to the actor when Craig was initially announced as 007 – Craig remains philosophical about it. Craig recalled that the reactions were usually along the lines of ‘Too short, too blond, too thespy’. Craig wondered: ‘Can one be too thespian?’

Regarding his ’emotionally knackered’ version of 007, Craig said that his inspiration was the fictional archaeologist and hero Indiana Jones: ‘What was brilliant was that he was fallible, he bled. It never left me. If you do action, an audience has to feel jeopardy’.

Dean reflected that Daniel Craig is an actor so hooked on his role as Bond that, for SPECTRE, he was involved from the beginning: in the writing, casting, and crewing. In addition, Craig explained that his interest in Bond’s backstory is ‘hard-wired’ into him as an actor. He said: ‘First and foremost, get the story right. Then make whizz-bangs part of it. Character becomes important, and that’s the interesting way of doing this. He’s got older as I’ve got older, and I’ve changed and he’s changed. I don’t know how else to do it’. Craig added that, if you stick to the rules of Ian Fleming’s creation, you can do ‘anything you want’.

While he and director Sam Mendes tried hard to make Bond a little bit more modern, Craig pointed out that agent 007 is still ‘of the old world’, using intelligence-gathering methods that don’t necessarily rely on the electronic mass surveillance techniques employed by modern spy agencies today. Bond lives in a ‘fantastical world’ that has ‘supervillains’.

‘I don’t know if supervillains exist’, said Craig: ‘They could. There’s maybe an island somewhere that sinks. Or maybe they are in plain sight, parking boats off St Tropez every summer’.

Craig, when asked about his immediate plans after SPECTRE, said he needed to meet more directors, but also hinted at a return to the stage at some point. And, on the question of his tenure as Bond, when asked whether the 25th Bond movie (the one after SPECTRE) will be his last, he responded: ‘I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, yes. Maybe’.

SPECTRE will be premiered in central London on October 26th, and will go on general release the same day, rolling out in other countries over subsequent days.

Craig

Please Share This Story: