Actor Daniel Craig talks to Elizabeth Grice about Waugh, TV conflict and the problems of playing it posh

A funny thing happened on the way to Pinewood Studios. Stuck in traffic on a half-demolished section of suburbia, I noticed a man up a 12ft ladder slowly wielding a pasting brush. A flap of wet poster flopped over his hand. As he worked and the traffic stalled, the face of the man I was crawling along the A40 to see emerged on the billboard - the wide, lumpy, brooding features of Daniel Craig. Even from that distance you could see that this man has eyes of ice.

Craig is about to freeze our television screens as Guy Crouchback, the tortured hero of Evelyn Waugh's war trilogy, "Sword of Honour." You may remember him as Geordie Peacock, the hapless musician in the television saga "Our Friends in the North," or as Ray the schizophrenic in the film "Some Voices" or for his performance in William Boyd's First World War drama, "The Trench."

Or again, you may not. Craig, 32, is one of those idiosyncratic, slow-burn actors who don't appear to be going anywhere until the evidence racks up, role by role. A face and voice that have been taking shape somewhere else and now come looming out of the mist, logical and solid, like the soldier on the billboard.

There is a great deal of time to contemplate the phenomenon of Daniel Craig - his solid body of work, his solid body - while I am marooned in a dressing room at Pinewood at the mercy of his production schedule. He is cavorting with Angelina Jolie, the Lara Croft heroine, in Hollywood's adaptation of the video game Tomb Raider, so it is understandable that I am left to inspect the crumbs on the carpet and to wonder who last used the bathroom.

After about an hour and a half, there is a doomcrack knock at the door and Craig bursts in, full of apologies. He extends a damp hand. His hair is wet and spiky and he is wearing a blue towelling dressing gown with a hood. His see-through eyes are transfixing. He has to return to the set immediately, he blusters. "Maybe I'll get 10 minutes later. If anything changes, I'll send word." In a cloud of droplets, he is gone.

Word does not come. Craig reappears in person half an hour later, still looking as though he has just got out of the shower, still breathless and apologetic. He's finding this action-movie stuff "mindblowing" - worlds away from anything he has done before, from Guy Crouchback, from soldierly reticence and understatement.

"The big sets take 10 minutes to reset every time you do a take. You have to do them over and over and over again. You have to keep yourself sane."

I tell him about the man on the ladder, pasting his features on to a billboard the size of a double bed. Thousands of other men with long brushes are doing the same in locations all over the country. His giant face will confront him on the road home to the Wirral, reminding him he's on the cusp, as they say in the business, of something big. He's not impressed. "Weird, isn't it?" But not nearly so weird, he suggests, as rushing in and out of a dressing room in towels, talking about yourself and then having to read it in a newspaper. He reads stuff about himself "really quickly," shivers with distaste, and then throws it away.

Craig gives a snuffly, genuine sort of chuckle. It's a pity he can't relax with a cigarette and a drink and stop wondering whether he's going to sound like an actorly brat. At one point, he catches himself using the phrase "emotionally vulnerable" and withdraws it with a shudder.

He says he jibbed at playing Guy Crouchback, "because I'd never really played posh before. I didn't know if I could do it justice. If I could bring a reality to this person without putting on a silly accent." So although he talks "commarndo" instead of "commando" and "barth" instead of "bath", this is no plum-eating role of the Brideshead type.

Craig was brought up on Merseyside. His mother is a teacher, so he supposes that must make him middle class. Although there is hardly any trace of Liverpool in his voice, he doesn't trust himself as a posho. "I'm not scared of it, but Evelyn Waugh was very particular about his class system. That's what he lived for. The joke was that he was middle class himself, aspiring to be upper class. When I read that, I thought: well, that's quite cool; that's OK."

Although he has done his bit to project the madness of war (with his friend William Boyd in "The Trench," now in "Sword of Honour"), Craig sounds fed up with the British obsession with reliving this century's two great bloodbaths. "I wish we'd get over it," he says. "I really do. We do seem to fight it every night on television."

The story of Crouchback's gradually corroding ideals suits Craig's sceptical cast of mind rather well. With great delicacy and remarkably few words, he portrays an Englishman's search for honour through joining a just war against the forces of evil. "But there's no honour in war or death. His ideals are completely compromised, shattered by the end."

Craig hates to be thought too studious. He didn't want to put an accent on "because it would be a study of something" and he doesn't think much of my tidy suggestion that his character is redeemed at the end. "I don't care if there's no redemption," he says. "That's not why I do something, to make him look good at the end."

Compliments make him prickly and are best left unsaid. There's a typical Waugh scene early on where Crouchback's wayward ex-wife (Megan Dodds) accuses him of trying to seduce her only because in the eyes of the Roman Catholic church they are still married and she is the one woman with whom he can have conscience-free sex. Craig's wounded response is almost entirely done with his facial muscles. It is powerful stuff.

"God, I don't know, really," he says, running his hands despairingly through his hair as if he's just heard bad news. "I don't think about making something powerful. I'm just trying to get at the reality of it - if there is a reality."

Craig left school at 16 and came to London to join the National Youth Theatre. Acting was all he ever wanted to do, from the age of six, but romanticise his story at your peril. He had a happy childhood: it wasn't teenage rebellion; he wasn't driven. "My parents just wanted me to be happy, like parents do. It was no big deal. It wasn't: Oh my God, he's going to become an actor."

He responds irritably to imagined cliches. "Driven at 17? Some 17-year-olds may be driven but I certainly wasn't. I was just like everybody else, living day to day, getting on with it."

Until he got into drama school, he worked in restaurant kitchens and slept on friends' floors. He's never had a career plan, just a series of small lucky breaks leading to bigger lucky breaks, leading to the sudden realisation, after "Our Friends," that he had the power to say no to things. "And that's what you've got to do. You've got to hang on and wait."

Basic questions about his background and family life are treated like hand grenades. "I can't particularly trust myself about what I'll say so I don't say much. There's no reason for my mother or my father [long separated] to be involved in any way." So the details remain sketchy: a failure at school; an early marriage; the birth of a daughter, now eight, who lives with his ex-wife in west London; a German girlfriend - actress Heike Makatsch; a rented flat; a certain hopelessness with money. "The money I was making at 22 disappeared - and it's still disappearing. The more you have, the more you spend. I have no idea where it goes."

He wishes his education had been deeper but must realise it no longer matters. "I can't really write and that bothers me. I didn't acquire that essay thing. I just cannot sit down and write even half a page."

At school, he approached Shakespeare as if reading a foreign language, with fear and loathing, and prefers not to think about acting it. "I would probably, deep down inside, egowise, love to do it. But with Shakespeare, you've got to leave your ego at the door and that's sort of scary."

He's so distrustful of the normal credentials and trappings of actorliness ("poncing around on stage" as the people he grew up with called it) that you wonder if this isn't an act in itself. But accuse him of not caring and it all falls away. "I'm not at all scathing really," he says, "because I love it. It's my life. Maybe it's too much of my life, but that's the way it is. I just love doing it." Why couldn't he say that before?

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