By John Naughton

"You need to impress me, outwit me, compete with me? Go ahead, knock yourself out." He plays one of the most iconic and identifiable characters in cinema, but off screen he remains an enigma, with his recent marriage to fellow Hollywood A-lister Rachel Weisz somehow eluding the long lens of the world's media. But in this extraordinary interview, the spy who refuses to come in from the cold explains why he won't play the fame game, fills GQ in on The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and getting his own ink done, and confesses to going to extremes to find the ultimate Bond.

You're in a race. You over­take the person in second place. What position are you in?

Daniel Craig - under Paxman-like instructions to answer as soon as he buzzes - puts his hands behind his head and rocks backwards on his sofa, his eyes squeezed shut as if he's about to perform another painful abdominal crunch. Finally, he opens his eyes to slits and offers, "First place?"

Nobody gets that right. It's second place.

A grin crosses his face and an oath escapes his lips (not for the last time today). It's the smile of a man who overtook the person in first place to be the current race leader.

He's Bond, of course, and with the franchise back in black, he'll soon be reunited with his Road To Perdition director, Sam Mendes, when he begins shooting his third instalment, Skyfall, due in October 2012 to coincide with the series' golden anniversary. But he's much more too. He's here today at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York's genteely distressed SoHo (an area so funky there's even a half-decent Starbucks next door) on promotional duty for David Fincher's English-language version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

It marks the culmination of his latest round of big-budget, between-Bond activity, which has also included Cowboys & Aliens, The Adventures Of Tintin and Dream House, the latter where his romance with the unfeasibly attractive, inde­cently intelligent Rachel Weisz took off, leading to their secret marriage in Manhattan last year. If Charlie Sheen hadn't made the gerund his own, one might say Daniel Craig was #winning.

How did he do it? How did he hit the front? Talent will only get you so far. He must be a competitive beast, you imagine.

"The genuine truth," he laughs, "and I do think about this a lot, is that I'm one of the least competitive people you'll ever meet. Except with myself. If I'm in restaurants, there's often guys there doing this thing [he mimics a man puffing out his chest in confrontational fashion], 'Oh, f***ing James Bond.' Whatever. You need to impress me, outwit me, compete with me? Go ahead, knock yourself out, I have no problem with that at all. I played a lot of sports when I was a kid and I don't think I was particularly competitive, but the games I loved best were when I forgot completely to be com­petitive and that's when I won.

"And that's what I try to achieve. If you can get to that place where it doesn't matter - but really it does - then you win.

"I got a piece of advice a long time ago," he continues. "Declan Donnellan [legendary British theatre director, co-founder of Cheek By Jowl] gave me and a roomful of other acting students this piece of advice. He said, 'You can't get bitter. You can't get bitter about what might have been.'"

That's easy for you to say. As far as one can see, you've got nothing to be bitter about.

"Well I know it's easy for me to say," he replies. "But hand on heart, going into my third year of drama school, and the s*** was hitting the fan and people were trying to get agents and competing really nastily with each other, well not nastily, but desperately, I was [he shrugs his shoulders] not bothered.

"And every time I've failed to replicate that," he continues, "then s*** has started to go wrong. I never want to know who went up for the part. I never want to know who my agent's other clients are. I never want to know what they're doing, how they're doing. I do not give a s***. As soon as you start doing that, you start questioning your own existence, questioning why you don't have this and that, and it destroys you. The grass is always greener."

He pauses to draw breath, to ruminate on his own interpretation of that cliché-because-it's-true expression.

"There's always going to be someone with a bigger toy than yours."

There are many good things about in­terviewing Daniel Craig. He's relaxed, funny and polite. He will ask how you are. He won't ask for a minder (almost compulsory in most conver­sations with any thesp who's appeared in more than one episode of a soap opera). The diffi­culty with interviewing Daniel Craig, however, is that it gets very meta very quickly.

Before long, you end up discussing the dif­ficulty of interviewing Daniel Craig. You end up discussing other people's difficulties interview­ing Daniel Craig. You end up discussing a par­ticularly disastrous encounter with Jonathan Ross a few years ago, when, in the course of promoting Casino Royale follow-up Quantum Of Solace, he gave the impression that given the choice between Wossy's leather sofa or being waterboarded in Guantanamo it would be a window seat on the next rendition flight to Cuba for Mr Craig.

"I'm just not very good at it," he recalls with a wry grimace, the memory of his tongue-tied, magic-free encounter with Ross still obviously fresh in his mind.

"I can't do that. I don't have jazz hands," he laughs, throwing out his large mitts in the manner of the Broadway song-and-dance make-'em-laugh merchant he most patently is not. "I wish I did have f***ing jazz hands, but I don't.

"I can't do it," he continues, enumerating the reasons why he often comes across badly on chat shows. "I'm a really bad liar. I don't have those pat things to say. Well, I have a schtick; everyone has a schtick. But if I don't feel it, I can't turn it on. Jonathan's probably like, 'Help me out here.' And I don't know what to do! Jazz hands! 'Tell me a funny story.' I don't know any funny stories. This is a funny story. What's happening now."

It's part of a wider problem, a dilemma that's familiar to anyone who's followed Craig since his landing of the 007 role put him in the centre of a media scrum back in 2005. Since then, he has adopted an approach to publicity that would make Greta Garbo look garrulous. His unwillingness to discuss anything about his private life has caused his public conversations to calcify, as interviewers are intimidated to ask anything for fear of causing offence, while his personal code of not revealing confidences has made him wary and uncomfortable, feeding a cycle of distrust. In six years he has gone from the chorus line of British film to the front row of Hollywood. All with the Tom Ford sun­glasses on and the lips sealed.

Against a running tide of emotional inconti­nence, Craig has charted a taciturn course that has left many of his interrogators, often for the first time since infancy, speechless.

"It's a thankless task being a talk-show host," he reasons, almost sympathetically. "Especially if you have to do a show every day. I look at these guys over here - Letterman, Leno. Whatever you think of them - and they're not shows I tune into - but you look at them and you think, you earn your money. It's a lot of money, but you earn it."

Especially when they get a guest like you.

"Exactly," he laughs. "Sometimes they get guests like me. [Adopts upbeat voice] 'So, how are you?' [Switches to surly teenager] 'All right.' Actually I did it recently for Cowboys & Aliens, and I kind of relaxed about it a bit more. Say less, laugh more. Laugh at every joke. I was a bit more chilled about it. I don't care."

Does it not bother him that people might see him as surly and aloof?

"But the only way to get round that would be to go out and do a huge PR thing. No, no, look at me. I'm really funny. And that would be terrible. Whatever happens has to happen nat­urally and I'm not going to go out there and compensate for something because there's an opinion about me. There's no point. It's just not the way I'm constructed. I think it would show me up in a worse light. 'Oh look, he's trying to make us like him now. What a c***!'

"I think you've just got to be yourself and occasionally things hit right. Sometimes I'm in an interview - like I'm enjoying this now - and it's relaxed. I have been in interviews where there's a camera and it's been OK. I think that's kind of special. I look at those interviews Parkinson did all those years ago with Fred Astaire or Jimmy Stewart. I was watching tapes of them - trying to figure out how to do it. It worked, didn't it? The thing is, you'd watch the next interview and it was always blown because, both of them, their expectations were way too high. It was a piece of magic that happened. Jimmy Stewart ended up crying at one point. He was caught off guard and so was Parkinson. I think that's rare."

Yet he finds himself spectacularly out of step with the current confessional climate.

"I think there's a lot to be said for keeping your own counsel," Craig reasons. "It's not about being afraid to be public with your emo­tions or about who you are and what you stand for; but if you sell it off, it's gone. It's precious. It's worth more than money. If you sell it for money, which is what it amounts to - maybe that sounds a bit dramatic, but that's essen­tially how I see it - then it's gone. You can't buy it back. You can't buy your privacy back. Ooh, I want to be alone. 'F*** you. We've been in your living room. We were at your birth. You filmed it for us and showed us the placenta, and now you want some privacy?'

"It's a career. What can I tell you?" he contin­ues. "It is a career; I'm not being cynical. And why wouldn't you? Look at the Kardashians, they're worth millions. Millions! I don't think they were that badly off to begin with, but now look at them. You see that and you think, 'What, you mean all I have to do is behave like a f***ing idiot on television and then you'll pay me millions?' I'm not judging it." He pauses. "Well I am obviously. I'm probably going to get visited by people from New Jersey."

He doesn't, it must be said, look too troubled at this prospect.

Craig took his stealth operation several levels below the downlow this summer, when he married Rachel Weisz in Manhattan in private. No TMZ leaks, no advance speculation and definitely no requesting the pleasure of your company. Just a post-wedding confirma­tion (after media requests) that might as well have been a gift-wrapped V-sign to every print and internet gossip sheet on the planet. Two of the biggest film stars in the world just got married under your noses and you haven't got so much as a blurry, long-lens pap-shot to show for it. It is not playing the game to an almost heroic degree. And like the witch not invited to Sleeping Beauty's christening, the tabloid press will not forgive and forget. There will be reper­cussions. There will be blood.

Unsurprisingly, no one has felt the need to coin a conflation of their names à la Brangelina. Creisz? Waig? Raniel? Daniechel? They don't exactly trip off the tongue. Even the conso­nants of their names aren't cooperating with Fleet Street.

He sports a pair of tattoos, now, on his inner biceps that may or may not have some connec­tion with his new wife. On his right arm are words, on the left a symbol.

"They are," he points out, somewhat superflu­ously, "mine. They're two very personal tattoos."

They look new.

"Yes, they are. They're just part of a stage I'm in," he laughs. "You should see the rest of my body. Then you'd be intrigued. Oh boy. It's been a very complicated couple of years."

He's joking, but he won't elaborate.

"I didn't get into this business to become famous," he argues. "Genuinely. You know what, at the back of my head, there was prob­ably always an idea, 'God, I'd love to be a movie star.' But honestly, I come from Liverpool. I thought there would be fat chance of that happening. I just wanted to be an actor and do my thing and this has happened."

But now that the dust has settled, why doesn't he, for example, furnish fans with a few details about the wedding day? After all, he won. He pulled it off. Can't he be magnani­mous in victory?

"No. Honestly, no. Absolutely, honestly no," he replies, very positively in the negative. "That of all things. We got away with it. We did it privately. And I've got a lot of people to thank for that. But that was the point. We did it for private reasons. Because we didn't want it f***ed up, because that would be sharing a secret. And the whole point is that it was a secret. A secret is a secret in my mind."

So how, one asks, more in hope than expec­tation, is married life?

"Ultimately, if I start making comments of any sort..." he hesitates. "Look. I'm in love. I'm very happy. And that is as far as I'm prepared to go. Life is long, life goes wrong and I don't want to say something now that might be thrown back later. Look at the s*** that's been written already. The racist s***. It's out there and you know what? F*** 'em. Not the nice people. The nice people don't write on the internet. But if that's the audience that I have to pander to, if that's what I have to do to make people feel happier about me, then no, f*** 'em. Because my hap­piness, I'm sorry, is more important to me. Ultimately, people are saying, 'Give it six months.' Well guess what? I'm not responding. Life is long and I am hopefully in this for the long run."

Having whipped himself up into a fury, a big smile crinkles across his face and he breaks out an imaginary hammer and chisel.

"If it says on my gravestone, 'Daniel Craig - Grumpy T***' then fine. There you go. I'll know better!"
Definitely not grumpy. Seriously. But cer­tainly his best roles on screen to date have all accessed a kind of glamorous gloom, whether it be Geordie in Our Friends In The North, the doomed alcoholic, crushed by the machina­tions of his vulpine boss, Malcolm McDowell. Or as George Dyer, Francis Bacon's boozy, breaking-and-entering bit of rough in Love Is The Devil. Or even James Bond, where he proved to be the first Bond to reflect the fact that - as in Ian Fleming's books - killing people for a living might not make you the easiest person to be around.

He looks a good fit, then, for playing Mikael Blomkvist, the Swedish investigative journalist who's hung out to dry at the begin­ning of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and then finds painful redemption unearthing the truth behind an unsolved murder in the company of the eponymous Lisbeth Salander. The book's dark undercurrents include neo-Nazi conspiracies, domestic violence and internecine feuding, and they are unlikely to be glossed over in the hands of David (Se7en) Fincher, still hot from the success of last year's Oscar-baiting Facebook biopic The Social Network.

Craig has seen the finished product and seems very happy with it.

"It does the book justice," he enthuses, aware of the responsibility to the late Stieg Larsson, an author like Fleming, only more so, who passed away without seeing his work come fully to the screen. "I'm in it a bit too much, but there you go. And she's brilliant."

She is Rooney Mara, who, as Salander, has potentially one of the great roles in modern cinema, but also some of the worst haircuts (think Rowan Atkinson in series one of The Black Adder then work down from there).

"Poor girl," Craig sympathises. "She's not been allowed in the sunlight either, she's bor­derline anaemic. But she's incredibly sexy and incredibly beautiful underneath all that. That's what you discover, and David was absolutely adamant that was what we needed to do to dis­cover her, both as a character and an actress. I think that was a great decision."

Craig, too, however, has suffered for his art.

"I was so fit when I started filming," he recalls, "that Fincher just used to send me bowls of pasta and bottles of wine. He said you don't look like a journalist, you're moving like an action hero. So it's taken me six months to stick a stomach on and six months to get rid of it. Nightmare."

As noticeable as his lack of abdominal defini­tion is the absence of accent. While everyone else on screen seems to muster something approaching a Scandinavian lilt, Craig - in the tradition of former Bond Sean Connery and a marker that you are a big star indeed - just sounds like himself.

"I didn't do it," he confirms. "I had a conver­sation with him [Fincher]. I said the Swedish people I know [slips into accent] speak like this. God that's a dreadful accent. I sound South African. Anyway, they have rid themselves of the accent because they've spent so much time in the UK or America. I said, 'Can I just not do it? Can we have a go and see how it sounds?'"

It sounds fine, actually. But reports from the set suggested that with or without accents, Fincher worked his actors hard, asking for multiple takes of every shot, à la Kubrick.

"He does do a lot of takes," Craig acknowl­edges. "But he didn't really do a lot with me. Besides, I'm an actor. I like dressing up and showing off. The more the better."

Nor is he fazed by the thought of making all three books into films, even though he tacitly agrees with my nuanced critique of the trilogy finale, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, as "tripe".

"High-class problems," he laughs.

True enough.

"What I like about him," he expands on the theme of Blomkvist, "is that he's very happy to hold her coat while she beats the s*** out of somebody. He's got a huge ego but not over stuff like that. If you're good at that job, you do it. I like that. He's totally non-sexist."
Not something that's ever likely to be said about his next challenge. As the size of his tattooed biceps attest - a gun show that would make Anchorman's Ron Burgundy purr with pride - he's back in training for Bond 23, aka Skyfall. Of course, he knows all the details. But he's not saying. In his defence, the chain of command on Bond runs a lot higher than him. Javier Bardem recently made an unauthorised announcement of his involve­ment as a villain (will he have a weapon to match No Country's captive bolt pistol, we wonder?). He'll probably get a slap for not observing protocol.

Starting out on a new Bond is enough to make him reflect on the first one, the film that caused the paradigm shift in his career.

"What's extraordinary," he ruminates on his decision to don the famous tuxedo, "is that at a point in my career when I was enjoying making movies and working with wonderful directors and just getting a big kick out of it, I was given this opportunity to do something for which I had no benchmark, no experience whatsoever. I threw myself into it full bore and it was a success. But I'm not quite sure how. Except that we had a good script; and I com­mitted to it; and we had a good cast; and [direc­tor] Martin Campbell did a pretty good job of that film whichever way you look at it.

"But there's a perfect Bond movie out there," he continues. "And I'm going to find it if it kills me. Which it might. I have to be that way about it. The script that we have at the moment - and this is not just actor hyperbole - I'm genuinely excited about it. There's a really good hook. In fact, we now have two or three really good hooks, two might work and that's what you want. That's what we had in Casino... but ulti­mately that's because it's based on source mate­rial, the book had those hooks. We've got those in this script and as long as we hit those, the rest of it is hopefully going to come together."

2012. Mayan year of the apocalypse; 100th anniversary of the Titanic; inevitable dismal exit from the European Championships. In Bond we trust.

There's one other part to Daniel Craig's success and it calls to mind billionaire John Paul Getty's famous formula for getting on in life: "Rise early, work hard, strike oil."

Did things really take off when he landed CAA as his American agents?

"Well, I think the significant move was Bryan Lourd," suggests Craig diplomatically. Lourd is Hollywood's equivalent of an oil strike. His client list, in alphabetical order, runs: Clooney, Cruise, De Niro... Do we need to go on?

"Bryan took me on," he explains. "He sweet­ened the deal, he came to see me and he was Bryan Lourd, CAA. Oh my God. I built up a re­lationship with him and I count him as a friend. That's the only way I know how to do business - being straight and honest - and we found out about each other. It took me a long time. It took me ten years to build up a relationship with my British agent, it takes that long, I think."

Which still leaves the rising early, working hard part of the formula.

"I'm definitely not satisfied about my career," he concludes. "I don't know how you can be; it's the very
nature of things. I'm always trying to figure it out and I'm kind of unsatisfied constantly. I always want to get
it right and I don't know what the answer to it is. But I do know that it's out there and I do know it's worth looking for.

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