"I need carbs down my throat! I need protein!" cries Daniel Craig as he strides down Wardour Street in London's Soho. Dressed in a torn white T-shirt, jeans and blue-tinted Gucci sunglasses that he's expecting to lose ("I might as well give the optical store money, and throw the glasses in the street," he quips), the 36-year-old actor swings into a conveyor-belt sushi place and, within minutes, is wolfing down crab rolls and salmon sashimi.

He may be hungry--last night was a late one--but there's no doubt that Craig's starving-artist days are now behind him. Last year, he starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the Sylvia Plath biopic, Sylvia, and turned on his raw sexual charm as a carpenter in The Mother. This year, he shines as a cynical professor of genetics in Roger Michell's adaptation of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, and next March he'll play a cocky cocaine dealer in Matthew Vaughn's crime thriller Layer Cake. Neither of these two most recent characters is particularly pleasant, and Craig, who talks as fast as he eats, isn't afraid to admit it. "I do bar mitzvahs, weddings--and I'll frighten your kids anytime," he says between mouthfuls of rice.

Craig does have a lengthy list of things he won't do. Though he had a bit part in Elizabeth, he's not interested in costume dramas. ("If the right one came along that would be different," he says. "But not flit involves playing the f---ing mandolin and saying 'My darling.'") He starred alongside Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, but he's not a fan of big-budget Hollywood films ("It's just not my bag"). And most unusual of all for someone who graduated from London's prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he was a year ahead of Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes, he won't do Shakespeare. "Too many words, and I don't understand them," he says. "Way too many opportunities to make a fool of yourself."

What Craig is drawn to, judging from his current projects, are films involving tension, violence and tortured souls. Of his slick Layer Cake character, he says, "I wanted to make him faceless--someone who can walk in and out of a room and no one notices. That's what a modern criminal is all about." But try as he might to blend in, Craig's onscreen presence makes him hard to forget. With his neat and narrow Savile Row suits and impossible self-confidence, he's reminiscent of a young Michael Caine--and his icy blue eyes and ginger-blond hair only add to the effect.

In Enduring Love, Craig plays a more cerebral man--a genetics professor who comes to the conclusion that life is about breeding and nothing more. Despite his less than romantic worldview, he's being stalked by an infatuated loner, played by Rhys Ifans. The film is Craig's second with Michell, the director who in 2002 convinced him to take on the risky role of a ne'er-do-well builder who's having sex with a 67-year-old grandmother--and her daughter--The Mother. "I think the issue [of sex and the over-60 set] needs to be debated, because the fact is that it's going to happen," he says, leaning menacingly across the table. "They're doing it now! As we speak. F---ing everywhere, in all sorts of positions--and wearing leather!"

According to Michell, Craig has a jarringly multifaceted appeal onscreen. "As an actor, he carries around an odd paradox," says the director. "You lift him up to the light, and he's this charming, easygoing, friendly guy, and then you tilt the light a little and you see this mad, psychopathic, very scary person. It's the tension between those two prisms that's interesting."

According to the tabloids, Kate Moss has succumbed to Craig's allure--the two are often photographed on the town together. But Craig, who is divorced with an 11-year-old daughter, denies the rumors. "We're friends," he insists, "and always were." For the time being, at least, his romantic needs appear to be fulfilled by his work. "When I was a kid, I had all those romantic ideas of wanting to be a movie star," he says. "And I still have a lot of that."

Источник: http://W Magazine