CAN Bond EVER keep his top on?
At 52 he’s stripped off AGAIN to promote his latest outing. But after baring his chest in almost every film he’s made, has Daniel Craig lost his licence to thrill?
AH, 006-pack, we’ve been expecting you . . . how else are we to greet the photoshoot in this month’s GQ magazine, featuring a bare-torsoed Daniel Craig celebrating his final outing as James Bond?
The look is less human chest, more gladiatorial breastplate. Forget martini glasses, crisp tuxedos and even Q’s baffling array of gadgets. Ever since Daniel Craig took up the James Bond mantle 14 years ago, fans have come to expect one thing of his portrayal of the superspy: his sculpted torso will get as much screen time as his revolver.
In fact, appearances by his naked torso have become so mandatory, I wonder if his agent had ‘wanton display of pecs’ written into his contracts.
Take Casino Royale, his first Bond film. There was much talk of his sky-blue budgie- smugglers, but every red-blooded woman will tell you what really made the greatest impact as Craig waded out of the sea — yes, it was his incredibly sculpted pecs.
For the first time since Sean Connery, viewers could believe this was a Bond physically capable of crushing his foes like walnuts.
Even in crucial moments where our hero is suddenly vulnerable to the baddies, this Bond knows all too well that those scenes work best when served naked.
If he wasn’t taking his top off, baddies were doing it for him. As Craig himself once said about a scene in Casino Royale where he is taken captive by arch-enemy Le Chiffre: ‘He strips me naked, puts me in a Bentwood chair that has no seat in it, then tortures me very hard with a piece of rope.’
Not that Craig’s top- class bodywork comes without effort. According to reports, the actor spends 12 hours a day working out when he is preparing for Bond movies. ‘That’s every day,’ he said recently. ‘Every day I don’t want to [work out]. But you just make yourself do it.’
I, for one, would just like to say a personal thank you on behalf of womankind that Craig pushes himself through the pain barrier on a regular basis and is so keen to show us the results.
I should confess here that I was an early Craig enthusiast. In 1996, when everyone I knew was watching the BBC drama Our Friends In The North, I was fixated with Daniel Craig’s Geordie, while my female friends were keener on the characters played by Christopher Eccleston and Mark Strong.
My crush deepened when I watched an adaptation of Minette Walters’ The Ice House the next year, in which Craig played a junior detective investigating a murder.
He burnt up the screen with his iceblue eyes, faintly pockmarked skin, uneven haircut (there’s something deeply attractive about men who aren’t too perfect) and disarmingly sensual lips. From then onwards, I pretty much watched any drama starring Craig to wallow in his sex appeal.
Even though he was fully dressed t throughout, all I can remember about the 1998 film Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett, is Craig’s d dissident priest-turned-assassin.
And when he did take his top off — in 2003 movie The Mother — I turned green with jealousy when he had a steamy sex scene with veteran actress Anne Reid.
All my girlfriends knew it. When Emma Bridgewater brought out a tea towel printed with the words, ‘I had a really nice dream last night about Daniel Craig’, I received three as presents.
So when Craig was cast as Bond, it felt as if every other love tourist
in the world had discovered my favourite beach — and I wasn’t prepared to share him with millions of other women who had been too lazy before then to tune into his special animal magnetism.
Nor did I realise quite how much of him I’d have to share. But even before Bond, there were clues that Daniel liked to get things off his chest.
Somewhat implausibly, he went topless as the saturnine poet Ted Hughes in the 2003 film Sylvia, gazing into co-star Gywneth Paltrow’s eyes on a windswept beach.
And he spent most of the 2004 film Layer Cake — with lucky old Sienna Miller — naked from the waist up.
There are sultry chest scenes in the 1998 Francis Bacon biopic Love Is The Devil. He bares almost all in the bath for 2000’s Some Voices with Kelly Macdonald, and sports some rough tattoos over the muscle mass in Logan Lucky, released in 2017. But the Bond films Quantum Of Solace and Skyfall are both full- on six-pack sizzle-fests, with some bruising and bullet holes to titillate.
I’ll admit I’ve had to curb my crush a little in recent years. When Craig dated, then married, the ravishingly gorgeous Rachel Weisz it was time to admit defeat.
One small compensation is that Weisz owns the film rights to a comedic period of my life when I edited a small literary magazine entitled the Erotic Review. The plan was that she would play a fictionalised version of me.
So when she married Craig it was a bit like a fictional Rowan tying the knot with Daniel Craig, which is as real as my fantasies will ever get.
So thank you, 007, for your duty to Queen, country and, above all, womankind. You and your chest have done us proud. But — and I say this as your 001 fan — the time has come to leave us on a high and put your shirt back on.