Craig needed his Bond to die so he could move forward
You might call the timeline of this transitional period in Daniel Craig’s career circuitous, even tangled.
In the three-plus years since filming his final scene as James Bond, Craig saw the release of “No Time to Die,” the last of his five movies as the British super-spy, delayed multiple times by the COVID-19 pandemic; witnessed “Knives Out,” in which he played Southern detective Benoit Blanc, bring in more than $300 million worldwide and earn an Oscar nomination for writer-director Rian Johnson; and completed the next installment in the emergent franchise, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”
Just don’t ask Craig to unravel it.
“Sure, if you say so,” Craig said when asked of the overlap between “Knives Out,” “No Time to Die” and “Glass Onion” during a recent Zoom call from his home in Brooklyn, New York, noting that exactly when he did what is a blur.
That may explain why the 54-year-old actor hasn’t had adequate time to reflect on his run as one of the most iconic characters in movie history, or what it meant to him personally and professionally.
“I’d love to give you a very succinct and proper answer to that, but I don’t think I have one,” Craig said. “It’s just too big of a thing to really get into a pithy comment. It’s been a large part of my life and has taken up most of my working life for the past 17, 18 years now. And to really put that into some sort of perspective, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it. Really. It’s not that I’ll not want to, but to sort of sum it up, how does one sum that up?”
With the announcement that Craig had been chosen as Bond in 2005, the relatively little-known character actor suddenly became one of the world’s most famous leading men. And as a performer, Craig transformed the role in a way none of his predecessors had, bringing a Cold War-era character firmly into the 21st century with emotional interiority, even vulnerability, alongside the bruising hardman.
Craig’s recent work, from the sly, comedic Blanc to his explosive turn in “Macbeth” on Broadway opposite Ruth Negga to the recent Belvedere vodka ad, directed by Taika Waititi, that finds Craig dancing through a Paris luxury hotel, point to an actor finding his footing as he puts Bond behind him. But Craig takes issue with that assessment.
“You’re making the mistake that I somehow have a plan,” Craig said with a laugh. “I don’t give it that much thought. This isn’t post-Bond for me. I don’t have a game plan. The things that happen in my life professionally, the decisions I make about them are gut, mainly.
“They’re not like, ‘Oh, I need to do this now and I should do this and I should do this,’” said Craig. “I used to do that a little bit when I first got Bond and the shock to the system of it, and it’s a fool‘s errand. You can’t balance life out like that. I don’t think life works in that way. ‘Knives’ Out came along and who knew? I mean, certainly I didn’t, Rian didn’t, [producer] Ram [Bergman] didn’t. None of us knew that it would be a success or that people would like it.”
“Glass Onion,” in theaters Nov. 23 for a limited one-week engagement a month before its streaming debut on Netflix Dec. 23, finds Blanc on the private island of a tech billionaire (Edward Norton) who has invited a group of old friends — played by Kate Hudson, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Dave Bautista and Janelle Monáe — for a weekend-long murder mystery party. Secrets are revealed, truths told and finding out who gets killed is as much a part of the movie’s fun as finding out the killer.
The soft pastels, creamy safari suits, high waists and jaunty neckerchiefs of Craig’s costumes in “Glass Onion” — which he described as a cross between Cary Grant in “To Catch a Thief ” and Jacques Tati in “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday” — signal a bolder, broader movie than “Knives Out.” (Perhaps no surprise, given the $450 million deal Netflix reportedly made for “Glass Onion” and another sequel.)
“The movie itself definitely is a little bit bigger. It was actually entirely a function of who and what it’s yelling about,” Johnson said. “I think once I started writing to these characters and to this situation and to the stuff that the movie was talking about, its voice just naturally raised a couple of decibels.”
Johnson and Craig first met when Johnson was putting together his 2008 movie, “The Brothers Bloom,” which ultimately starred Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz. (Imagine the timeline shift had Weisz and Craig, who married in 2011 and have a child together, co-starred in “Bloom.”)
Keeping in touch, Johnson and Craig next batted around the idea of the actor appearing in Johnson’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” — “This will be the headline: ‘Daniel was supposed to be in “Star Wars,’” Craig joked — but the pair didn’t end up working together until “Knives Out.”