He was hooked to a wire, and he'd trained with the stunt department for two months. But when Daniel Craig was actually standing in an upper-storey window in Siena, Italy, on location for Quantum of Solace – his second outing as super-spy James Bond, opening Friday – about to jump onto the roof of a bus that was barrelling down the narrow alley below, he found it, he deadpanned, “very disconcerting.”

“Your mind just goes, ‘No,'” Craig said, from the safety of a Toronto hotel sofa during a whistle-stop publicity tour (Chicago last night, Los Angeles tomorrow). “You've got half of Siena who've turned up to watch – ‘What's this idiot doing?' You want to nail it first off so you don't have to do it again. Then this actor thing comes out in me: ‘Must get it right. Must entertain.' It's awful.”

Not for the audience. Craig, 40, is unlike the five men who preceded him as 007, and not because he's blond. He's the most serious actor of the lot, having played roles as varied as a selfish poet (Ted Hughes in Sylvia), amoral drug dealer ( Layer Cake), family slayer ( Infamous), lover of painter Francis Bacon ( Love Is the Devil) and tormented professor ( Enduring Love). His fierce realism in his first Bond film, 2006's Casino Royale, reinvigorated the franchise, earning the highest grosses of its 46-year history, $594-million (U.S.) worldwide. The first thing that went out the window was the kind of nudge-wink irony that had come to characterize the series. When Craig gets hit, he looks like it hurts (in fact, during filming, he sliced off a fingertip and got a black eye that required eight stitches), and when he jumps, his body is taut with purpose.

In person, however, he's not what I expected. Yes, he's insanely handsome, with a face that seems carved by a sculptor to suggest manly experience, and blue eyes so bright it's as if a key light is permanently aimed into them. But he's more compact and delicate than he appears on screen, and much friendlier. He doesn't brood or glower; he's modest and laughs a lot. He is, dare I say it, jolly. He refers lovingly to his teenage daughter, from a two-year marriage that ended in 1994. He wore a white shirt, black tie and tan cardigan that was half GQ, half grandpa, and his right shoulder was in a sling, healing from recent surgery on an old injury that he'd exacerbated playing Bond.

“I couldn't tell you which scene did it,” he said. “I look at the movie and go, ‘Oh, it could have been there, or then.' I phoned up my mother earlier and said, ‘I'm aching today.' She said, ‘Welcome to my world.' “I'd love to do a movie where I'm doing the same stunts, but where I can go, ‘Holy shit!'” Craig continued. “Like that great scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they jump off the cliff, and they both go, ‘Aaaahhh,' and their arms are pinwheeling, trying to fly. That's a weird one – when you first do a jump, you do start flapping your arms. The stuntmen go, ‘Don't do that.' It must be some bird instinct in us somewhere.

“But the action stuff doesn't look right if you react to everything. If I'm in a car chase and I go ‘Ooo! Oh!' every time something happens, the audience says, ‘It's okay, it's a movie.' I don't want them to remember that. I'm driving into Siena in that car and it could be a big gag [here he mimes waving]: ‘Morning, everyone!' But [expletive] that, I want it to be serious. The audience should be breathing quite heavily at that point.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger had rules when playing his action heroes. For example, when you walk down the stairs, you never look at the stairs. Craig found that hilarious. “My influences – though believe me, I'll never get there – are people like Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy,” he said. “That manliness those guys had – they could look at the stairs, they could do whatever they wanted. There were no rules for them. Tracy would enter a scene looking down, and when he'd look up, his blue eyes would spark. But he'd say, ‘I'm just looking for my [expletive] mark,' because he was so short-sighted.” Craig laughed heartily. “Fred Astaire – he rehearsed for weeks upon weeks, and then shot his dance routines in one take. That is skill. Those are my heroes.”

Craig took his time signing on to play Bond. His attitude during his first, exploratory meeting with the franchise's long-time producers, siblings Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, was: “‘This is so nice of you. Quite frankly I can't imagine it, but good luck,'” Craig said. “We had a productive conversation about how they wanted to strip the franchise down and start again, but I went, ‘Wow, great idea – big job! I'll be going now,' and kind of backed out the door.”

He kept them waiting a year and a half, until he read the finished script. “Daniel is serious about his work,” Wilson said. “He shoots all day, then goes to the gym for an hour or two, goes home, has a very light dinner and is in bed by 9. He's very intelligent, interested in all kinds of things, politics, art. But he's very careful about what he does. He's chosen his career path very carefully.”

This December, Craig's serious-actor side gets a workout in Defiance, based on the true story of three Jewish brothers who survived the Second World War by setting up a camp in the frigid Belarusian forest. “It's a really interesting dilemma because they committed nasty crimes, but for the sake of survival,” Craig said.

Hmm. For a charmer, Craig seems perpetually drawn to playing bastards. “I've always liked a weakness in character,” he said. “I like flaws. Moral ambiguity is more interesting that somebody who just goes, ‘I'm right and you're wrong.' I like debate. How someone breaks. With Ted Hughes, for example, there wasn't an awful lot of redemption in the film, but I understood him. And reading Birthday Letters that he wrote for her [the poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide during their marriage], you went, ‘Oh, he loved her.' What happens in any relationship, nobody knows. Those things are interesting. Breaking someone down and building them up again is life, and you must explore that.”

He paused, grinning. “Drawn to bastards, am I?” he said. “Maybe you've picked something out. I'm a bit worried now.”

November 7, 2008