James Bond is slipping into a room at New York’s louche Bowery Hotel.
Naturally, I follow. When I knock, he opens the door.
‘Are you lurking out there?’ Daniel Craig asks, looking at me with ice-blue eyes.
I’ve come to interview him about Betrayal, the Harold Pinter play directed by Mike Nichols, in which Craig and Rachel Weisz will reprise their real-life roles as husband and wife – except with more sadism and pauses. Will audiences be able to wrap their heads around James Bond as a cuckold?
‘I hope they won’t be able to,’ Craig says, appearing delighted at the thought. ‘I hope they’ll get unnerved by it.’
The 45-year-old Craig is notoriously private about his romance with Weisz, 43.
They wouldn’t be interviewed as a pair; when I talk to them and their fellow Briton and co-star Rafe Spall, they avoid sitting next to each other; when the photos are taken, Craig chafes at looking too lovey-dovey.
‘Someone called us a power couple the other day,’ he marvels. ‘I was like, what the...’ – he drops in an expletive – ‘does that mean? We just keep ourselves to ourselves.’
The two fell in love in 2010 while making the movie Dream House, which was, like Betrayal, a domestic horror story. The movie sank, but they sparked.
Bond put the gold on her finger quietly two years ago in New York after they disentangled themselves from long relationships with others.
Craig was engaged to producer Satsuki Mitchell; Weisz had lived for nine years with director Darren Aronofsky, with whom she now shares custody of their seven-year-old son, Henry.
The newlyweds settled in Manhattan and put a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the relationship. But then they decided to star in a revival of Betrayal on Broadway.
So now they’re stuck answering questions about why they chose to play an unhappy husband and wife if it makes them unhappy to talk about being a husband and wife.
‘It’s a play about sex,’ Mike Nichols says, ‘with two sexy stars.’
He recalls working with the newlywed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1966 on the first movie he directed, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? They were a ‘giant worldwide circus’, he says fondly, with ‘absolute freedom about using their relationship in the work’.
‘This is the reverse,’ he says of Craig and Weisz. ‘They are completely private. What they have in common is a kind of grace, an adroitness with people. It’s very rare.’
Nichols, who won a Tony, Broadway’s Oscars, for best director last year for Death Of A Salesman, was friends with Pinter; he courted Craig, who describes himself as ‘a Pinter virgin’, for two years.
Written with a reverse chronology, Betrayal begins with the end of an affair between Emma and Jerry, a book agent who is also the best friend of Robert, Emma’s husband.
When it opened in London in 1978, the meta-marriage angle was then, too, part of the draw.
A married couple (Penelope Wilton and Daniel Massey) played the married couple, and Pinter chose to announce in the programme that he was living with the historian Antonia Fraser, publicly moving past his marriage to the actress and expert Pinter interpreter Vivien Merchant. (It was Pinter’s seven-year 1960s affair with the BBC’s Joan Bakewell, though, on which Betrayal was based.)
The reviews were largely hostile, dismissing the play, as the Guardian drama critic Michael Billington (later Pinter’s biographer) wrote, as ‘tiny ripples on the stagnant pond of bourgeois-affluent life’. (Billington later acknowledged that he hadn’t understood the play at first.)
Nichols initially talked to Craig about playing Jerry. But the actor decided he wanted the smaller but more potent role of Robert, and his wife wanted to come along to play Emma.
‘It seemed like an obvious thing to do; if it feels stunt-y, it wasn’t,’ Craig says.
They had been looking for a play to do together for some time, he said, adding that they met 20 years ago doing a workshop at the National Studio Theatre in London.
I had been prepared for Pinteresque silences; Craig has been known to play the sulky brute with interrogators. But instead, he’s funny, smart, charming and, for him, remarkably open.
He even seems a bit shy, admitting he’s afraid of extemporaneous public speaking because, he says, ‘I lose verbs’.
He’s dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, with tattoos peaking beneath the sleeves, and sporting a salt-and-pepper beard he’s grown for the part. Did the personal nature of the play give the press-averse actor pause, so to speak?
‘Maybe it’s a contradiction,’ he says.
‘I suppose the idea that we’re sort of exposing ourselves, you do that anyway onstage.
'We’re not exposing our marriage onstage.’
They have only one scene by themselves. When Emma confesses the affair, Robert says he likes Jerry better than Emma and suggests perhaps Robert and Jerry should have had the affair.
Asked about Pinter’s dictum that the two male friends not be played homoerotically,
Craig deadpans: ‘Well, he’s dead now, so he can’t stop this. I can’t tell you how much homoeroticism we’re going to squeeze into this play.’
Craig was the son of a pub landlord and an art teacher, raised near Liverpool, who dropped out of school at 16 to act.
He was briefly married to actress Fiona Loudon, a union that produced Ella, now 20, one of the few guests at his wedding to Weisz, the Cambridge-educated daughter of Jewish intellectuals from Austria and Hungary.
In your 20s, Craig observes, it’s hard to find love that offers ‘a kind of stability’, and ‘it’s very hard to make it stick, especially if you’re an actor’.
There was no romance back when ‘the world’s hottest couple’ met in 1994. Does he recall a glimmer then, when they acted in the steamy play Les Grandes Horizontales?
‘I’d rather not say,’ he replies. ‘But we’re together, so maybe there’s a clue in that.’ (Later, Weisz offers a radiant yes, adding that because the cast members improvised the play, ‘we would have to literally spend the day trying to seduce him’. She goes on: ‘It was really hard work, as you can imagine.’)
I ask Craig if his marriage to Weisz has changed him.
‘Yeah, for the better,’ he says. ‘I’m far happier than I’ve been for many years. I think finding the right person and being with the right person is probably the answer to most things.’
Can he envision himself in the position of Robert in the play, knowing his wife was having an affair with his best friend and allowing it to continue without confronting the friend?
‘I don’t think so, no,’ he says. ‘I’m not carved out of that cloth. I’m too working-class, or middle-class. I think when a marriage is that broken you need to walk away.’
Craig says they are determined to drag the play from the mannered place it tends to go and find ‘the guts’ of Pinter’s brutality, masked as conversations about squash and Yeats and Torcello and the trouble with modern prose.
He wants it to show how the characters are damaging each other – that ‘they love each other, but they do this’.
Craig and Weisz are moving into their own place in Manhattan after renting there; he’s been busy unpacking his books, including poetry collections by E E Cummings and Ted Hughes.
Weisz confides that her husband is a great cook of classic bistro food who is finicky about doing his own shopping. Craig reveals that, while they ordinarily like to keep it very simple, they occasionally spoil themselves with luxury trips.
As for bonding in an industry swirling with insecurity and narcissism, he knows there are pitfalls.
‘But I don’t see them,’ he says. ‘There will be problems, and they’ll be no bigger or less. We’ll have to figure it out like any other married couple, to the benefit of both of us, not just one.’
Would he and Weisz ever want to do a Jennifer Aniston-style comedy?
‘Does it have to be a Jennifer Aniston comedy?’ he asks mordantly.
Later, Weisz says she prefers something darker for them to bat around.
‘I’d love to do, in a decade, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?’
Like her husband, Weisz is funny and self-effacing. I note that the inspiration for Emma, Joan Bakewell – who seemed to regard her seven-year affair with Pinter as more fun than tragic – was a Cambridge graduate called ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’.
‘A lot of people get called that,’ Weisz says, smiling. ‘Helen Mirren is called that. I myself have been called that.’
She says she doesn’t find it sad, as someone who seems madly in love, to be in a play that’s mad at love, with a structure that underscores that passion wanes even as it blooms.
‘Happiness writes white, someone told me that,’ she says, adding that drama needs edge.
I ask how marriage has changed her. She hesitates a bit, saying it’s made her happier and a better person and mother. But she keeps gnawing on the question, musing that she never thought her life was heading toward marriage, noting softly (and incredibly): ‘It’s not like there were that many people asking.’
‘It’s a contract, marriage,’ she says finally. ‘There’s something very certain about the word “husband”. There are infinite ways to interpret Emma. But husband is husband.’
And with her luminous smile, she concludes about marriage: ‘I love it.’
She sees Emma as honourable, as Antonia Fraser put it, and Craig notes that Emma, possibly because Pinter wrote Betrayal soon after moving in with Fraser, was one of his first positive female characters.
When I ask Weisz if Pinter wrote so many sexually rapacious and manipulative female characters because he was scared of women, she laughs and says: ‘He was right to be. We’re a scary lot.’
Her dark, sensual looks and easy empathy will be a change for her character, often played by cool, unreadable blondes.
I ask Craig whether the chemistry between his wife and Spall, who plays Jerry, is good enough to make him jealous.
‘I don’t watch their scenes,’ he replies.
The three actors firmly reject the instruction of Pinter’s favourite director, Peter Hall, to be as precise ‘as the singers of Mozart’.
They say they intend to mine the humour and raw emotion, and to be, as Craig puts it, ‘more animal’.
‘If it’s three very privileged, intelligent people standing around talking very cleverly and wittily at each other,’ he concludes, ‘it’s a play I really don’t want to go see.’
‘Betrayal’ opens at Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre on October 27
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