James Bond is slipping into a room at the 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.
Those eyes are now as famous as those of Paul Newman — who played his father in the Irish gangster yarn "Road to Perdition” — but they’re very different. Newman’s were a warmer, cerulean blue, with a guarded expression. Mr. Craig’s are openly appraising: What do you want? What is he willing to give?
I’ve come to interview him about "Betrayal,” the Harold Pinter play directed by Mike Nichols in which Mr. 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,” Mr. Craig says, appearing delighted at the thought. "I hope they’ll get unnerved by it.”
The 45-year-old Mr. Craig is notoriously private about hs romance with the 43-year-old Ms. Weisz: 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, Mr. 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. Mr. Craig was engaged to the producer Satsuki Mitchell; Ms. Weisz had lived for nine years with the director Darren Aronofsky, with whom she now shares custody of their 7-year-old son, Henry.
The newlyweds settled in the East Village and put a "Do Not Disturb” sign on the relationship. But then they decided to star in a revival of "Betrayal” on Broadway, where previews begin on Oct. 1.
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, Mr. Nichols says, instead using a vulgarity, "with two sexy stars.”
Mr. Nichols 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 Mr. Craig and Ms. Weisz. "They are completely private. What they have in common is a kind of grace, an adroitness with people. It’s very rare.”
Mr. Nichols, who won the Tony for best director last year for "Death of a Salesman,” was friends with Pinter; he courted Mr. Craig, who describes himself as "a Pinter virgin,” for two years. The director had been taken by gritty performances Mr. Craig had given in British indies like "Love Is the Devil,” as a small-time crook who’s the lover of the artist Francis Bacon, and "Mother,” about a cocaine-snorting construction worker who reawakens passion in the widowed mother of his girlfriend.
In 2009, Mr. Craig proved that joining another star on Broadway could generate record ticket sales — even if they had merely recited "the alphabet in counterpoint,” as Ben Brantley put it in The New York Times — when he and Hugh Jackman starred as Chicago policemen in Keith Huff’s melodrama "A Steady Rain.”
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 program 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 Swinging Sixties affair with a BBC host, 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.” (Mr. Billington later acknowledged that he hadn’t understood the play at first.) In 1980, Blythe Danner and Roy Scheider played the married couple in the play’s Broadway debut, with Raul Julia as Jerry. Some critics questioned an American company’s ability to convey that deeply buried emotions were emotions nonetheless.
Mr. Nichols initially talked to Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 Theater in London.
In our interview, I had been prepared for Pinteresque silences and indirection; Mr. 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.”
The residue of smoke in the room puts the occasional smoker in a good mood. 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, midway through. 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, Mr. 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.”
There was no romance back when "the world’s hottest couple,” as British tabloids call them, met in 1994. Mr. 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 the actress Fiona Loudon, a union that produced Ella, now 20, one of the few guests at his upstate New York wedding to Ms. Weisz, the Cambridge-educated daughter of Jewish intellectuals from Austria and Hungary. In your 20s, Mr. 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.
”
Does he recall a glimmer in 1994 when they acted in the steamy play "Les Grandes Horizontales,” about a 19th-century Communard lolling about with four French courtesans, one of them played by Ms. Weisz?
"I’d rather not say,” he replies. "But we’re together, so maybe there’s a clue in that.” (Later, Ms. 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 him if his marriage to Ms. 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. "It’s that weird thing, like Roger Vadim having all his ex-wives round for dinner, that kind of thing of going, ‘Oh, I can deal with everything.’ 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.”
Mr. 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.”
Mr. Craig and Ms. Weisz, who also have a house in upstate New York, are moving into their own place in the East Village after renting there; he’s been busy unpacking his books, including poetry collections by E. E. Cummings and Ted Hughes. (He played Hughes in the movie "Sylvia,” and notes that a bathroom at Cambridge bears the scrawl "Sylvia Plath, psychopath.”)
In the "Stars are just like us” category, they loved watching their fellow Briton John Oliver host "The Daily Show.” They went to see John Waters’s one-man Christmas comedy show in Poughkeepsie. Ms. Weisz confides that her husband is a great cook of classic bistro food who is finicky about doing his own shopping. Mr. 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 Ms. Weisz ever want to do a Jennifer Aniston-style comedy?
"Does it have to be a Jennifer Aniston comedy?” he asks mordantly.
Later, over a pot of green tea at a Moroccan restaurant in the East Village, Ms. 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, Ms. Weisz is funny and self-effacing, casually ravishing in a 10-year-old Narciso Rodriguez emerald dress. 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.”
"In England, a lot of people get called that,” Ms. 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 mom. 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.”
In London, Ms. Weisz broke through in 1994 playing a "chubbier,” as she describes it, Gilda in Noel Coward’s "Design for Living,” and in 2009 she was Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire.” She sees Emma as honorable, as Antonia Fraser put it, and Mr. Craig notes that Emma, possibly because Pinter wrote "Betrayal” soon after moving in with Ms. Fraser, was one of his first positive female characters.
But Emma is still a Pinter woman, a dangerous Eve who disrupts the male Eden of camaraderie.
When I ask Ms. 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. "She is the sort you have to have when you see her,” Mr. Nichols says of Ms. Weisz.
I ask Mr. Craig if the chemistry between his wife and Mr. Spall, who plays Jerry, is good enough to make him jealous.
"I don’t watch their scenes,” he replies.
Mr. Spall, 30, the son of the British character actor Timothy Spall and the father of two young children, shed 70 pounds a few years back to turn himself into delicately handsome leading man material. Recalling his audition, Mr. Nichols said: "He just burst into flames. We were all sort of shook up. Something alive had happened between the three of them.”
Jerry, Mr. Spall says, wants to be Robert, and so he must possess his wife. Mr. Craig is fascinated with what Robert knows and doesn’t know, with his cruelty and deceptions and pain. In separate interviews and a session together, the three actors seem fiercely determined not to be stultified by Pinter syncopation, and they all firmly reject the instruction of Pinter’s favorite director, Peter Hall, to be as precise "as the singers of Mozart.”
They say they intend to mine the humor and raw emotion, and to be, as Mr. 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.”