LONDON: 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.
The long wait allowed plenty of time for disturbing
rumors to marinate. For instance: He is surly and defensive, a
reporter-averse utterer of combative monosyllables. Or this, from two
female film publicists: 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 normal 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 five 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 celebrity. 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. Actually 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 here, 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 skin-care 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-lapeled pornography baron from Manchester in the BBC
mini-series "Our Friends in the North"; a 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 range and heartbreaking
tenderness in "Infamous"; and the poet Ted Hughes in "Sylvia."
"Everybody said, 'Oh, aren't you afraid you'll be typecast?"' he
recalled, of taking the Bond role. "And I said, 'Of course I am,' but
if it has to be this - well, that's not too bad."
Traditionalists were appalled. The British tabloids, whose writers
possibly had not seen Craig in his other films, sniped that he was too
short, too blond, too actory, too potentially Lazenbyesque; they spread
the rumor that he didn't know how to drive a stick shift, let alone one
attached to an Aston Martin.
But from the first scene in
"Casino Royale" (2006), in which Bond brutally kills a man with his
bare hands and then coolly shoots and kills his own corrupt boss, Craig
proved to be a rare combination of plausibility, physicality and
charisma. He got rave reviews, and not just from Bond's traditional fan
base.
(Full disclosure: Craig's mix of emotional
vulnerability and cocky insouciance discomfited to an alarming degree
many of this reporter's female acquaintances. One saw "Casino Royale"
five times in two months. Efforts to find a way for interested outside
parties to pose as a reporter's assistant during the interview, or to
dress as plants and hide on the windowsill, proved unsuccessful.)
The latest movie, "Quantum of Solace," which opens in Britain, France
and Sweden on Friday and worldwide throughout the winter (see http://007.com/international/
), is full of the usual Bondian big guns, big explosions, big-busted
women and big, improbable, high-testosterone stunts, many of them
performed by Craig. While he bulked up for "Casino" - he wanted to
"look as if he could kill people just by looking at them," his personal
trainer, a former Royal Navy commando, said recently - in this film he
focused on building up his stamina, going for lean and mean over brawn.
(Craig was recently quoted in The Times of London as saying, "I
am not an athlete, although I have always enjoyed keeping fit between
bouts of minor alcoholism.")
Craig said that he had been
determined to ensure that the story made logical and emotional sense.
"Quantum" begins moments after "Casino" ends, with Bond, wielding an
enormous firearm, on the island where he has just shot one of the men
responsible for the death of Vesper Lynd, the treacherous love of his
life.
Craig particularly wanted Bond to have to contend with the emotional repercussions of Vesper's death.
"It was very important that we deal with that," he said. "I just felt
that you can't have a character fall in love so madly as they did in
the last movie and not finish it off, understand it, get some closure.
That's why the movie is called 'Quantum of Solace' - that's exactly
what he's looking for."
Last fall he and the director of
"Quantum of Solace," Marc Forster, set out to fill in the gaps in the
script, left incomplete because of the Hollywood writers' strike.
Forster said he was struck by how much Craig wanted to get the story
right and ensure that his interpretation of Bond was "not just a
cliché, but a character that people can connect to."
He
added: "He's very shy and slightly modest and humble, and he doesn't
like to be the center of attention. It's more like, 'Let's make good
movies and tell a good story and do a good job."'
Along
with "Quantum," Craig is appearing this fall in "Defiance" (set to open
in the United States and parts of Europe in late December and January),
based on the true story of the Bielskis, a trio of freedom-fighting
Jewish brothers in World War II. Defying the Nazis (and the odds), they
set up an unlikely community of tough, armed refugees in the punishing
Belarussian forest. Craig plays Tuvia, their complicated leader -
sometimes hot-headed, sometimes coolly rational; now seeking revenge,
now preaching restraint.
The shoot was tough. The actors had
to speak Russian in a number of scenes; they also had to live more or
less in the woods, in sometimes extreme frigid conditions, for three
months. Most of the cast came down with some sort of bronchial flu,
Craig said, "but when we started drinking more, it seemed to get
better."
The director of "Defiance," Edward Zwick, said it was
interesting to watch Craig take on the role, with all its ambivalence
and inner conflict, in tandem with playing the self-assured Bond.
"You see very clearly his ambition as an actor; he refuses to be just
one thing," Zwick said in a telephone interview. "What you have to
understand about Daniel is that he is a working actor who considers
himself that. He began in the theater and did all sorts of ensemble
work, and in some ways this was a territory in which he's more
comfortable than in being the star who's out in front of the movie."
Craig grew up in Liverpool and spent much of his spare time watching
movies, sometimes by himself, in a small cinema down the street from
his house. He left home as a teenager to seek his fortune as an actor
in London. He worked with the National Youth Theater, went to drama
school and began being cast as romantic leads, a designation he brushes
aside.
With each part, he explained, "I said to myself:
'Romantic lead - what is he? Is he an alcoholic? What's his deal?
What's his problem?' For me, that has always been the way. That's what
I did for Bond and what I try and do with everything."
He is determined to continue pursuing extra-Bond roles.
"I've been so fortunate to land this amazing role in a huge franchise,"
he said. "It's set me up in a really good way for life, and that's
wonderful. But I love acting, and I genuinely think it's an important
part of what life is about. I get a kick out of it, and I'm not good at
sitting around."
Craig, who has a teenage daughter from an
early marriage, genuinely seems more interested in talking about other
topics - the books of Philip Pullman; the exciting-to-him proposition
of Barack Obama being elected president; movies he likes - than he does
in talking about himself.
But he mentioned his longtime American girlfriend, with whom he lives in Los Angeles and London. He
wears a silver necklace inscribed with a quotation "about taking your
heart wherever you go," he said when asked, sounding suddenly shy.
Recently, he said, the two drove up the American West Coast, through to
the Pacific Northwest. They ducked into a small-town movie theater to
see the Guillermo del Toro movie "Hellboy II: The Golden Army."
Someone approached Craig.
"Has anyone ever told you you look like Daniel Craig?" the person asked.
"No," Craig answered, and walked on.
Published: November 2, 2008
Источник:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/01/arts/craig.php?page=1