By Darryl Smith.
THE name’s Craig, Daniel Craig — but when the new James Bond was announced late last year most 007 fans said a resounding ‘Who?’Such was the antipathy that, even before filming had begun on his first movie, Daniel was hit by an Internet campaign urging cinema goers to boycott it.
They unfairly claimed that the 38-year-old actor from Cheshire failed to meet the classic ‘tall, dark and handsome’ image of Bond on all three counts.
Now he has the chance to answer those critics the only way he could with this month’s release of Casino Royale.
To be fair, much of the hostility towards his appointment came from the fact that he wasn’t Pierce Brosnan.
The Irishman had breathed new life into the franchise after taking over from Timothy Dalton and proved the most universally liked Bond since Sean Connery oozed all that Scottish suave and sophistication in the 60s.
But after taking the spy off in a different direction, with mixed reviews, in Die Another Day, the intention of legendary Bond producer Barbara Broccoli was always to cast a new man in the role once it had been decided that the 21st movie in the chain would be Casino Royale.
That was Ian Fleming’s first book, written in 1953, in which he introduced James Bond to the world and explains how he acquires his licence to kill with its 00 prefix.
Understandably, it needed a fresh face to fit the story but that hasn’t stopped irate fans from claiming that Daniel’s face doesn’t fit the role.
“I do wish they’d reserve judgment,” the actor says of those who have pre-judged him. “I didn’t expect this backlash. You take it in, you can’t help it. I’ve been trying to give 110 per cent since the beginning but after all the fuss, maybe I started giving 115 per cent.
“If I went onto the Internet and started looking at what some people were saying about me now — which, sadly, I have done — it would drive me insane.
“They hate me. They don’t think I’m right for the role. It’s as simple as that.
“But nobody knows more than I do how important this is, and it’s my job to get it right.”
Daniel was all smiles this time last year when he arrived by speedboat along the Thames for his initiation in front of the world’s press.
He promised a tougher, grittier and darker 007 “with less gadgets”. He also told how he’d first felt when receiving the news.
“My first reaction was I needed a drink,” he joked, “so I had a couple of Martinis!
“I had a confidence about it — but that’s because of the people around me who made me feel good about it then.
“It’s a huge challenge. Life is about challenges and this is one of the big ones as an actor.
“There is a danger you can get trapped in the role. If you look at the track record of most Bonds — I mean Sean Connery obviously defined the part, and even he struggled for a while to get rid of the mantle.
“That’s the pitfall and it could happen to me. I’ve been working so hard, for however long it is I’ve been doing this, to try and stick to doing stuff I totally believe in, and that would be wiped out.
“But Bond is a huge iconic figure in movie history and these things don’t come along very often.”
The hard work that Daniel refers to includes waiting tables as a struggling actor before getting his first real break as Geordie Peacock, a hard man with a troubled past, in the BBC mini-series Our Friends In The North.
Born at the family home in Chester in March 1968, Daniel’s father was a merchant seaman turned steel erector, his mother an art teacher.
His parents split up when Daniel was four and he moved with his mother and older sister, Lea, to live in Hoylake, on the Wirral.
His interest in acting was encouraged by visits to the Liverpool Everyman Theatre arranged by his mother. From the age of six, Daniel started acting in school plays, and his mum, Carol, was the driving force behind his artistic aspirations.
“My mother knew actors and designers who worked at the Everyman so I got to go backstage and see them dressing up and showing off, and it was a magical place.
“Seeing that at a young age had a major influence on me and what I wanted to do when I grew up. I had an arrogance to believe I couldn’t be anything else.”
Regular roles in school plays led him to an audition, aged 16, with the National Youth Theatre and a subsequent move to London.
This was only a foot in the door towards his acting education and he failed at repeated auditions at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama before his persistence eventually paid off and he was accepted in 1988.
There he studied alongside Ewan McGregor and Alistair McGowan, then later Damian Lewis and Joseph Fiennes, among others. He graduated in 1991, after a three-year course under the tutelage of Colin McCormack, the actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company.
It was also at this time that he met Scottish actress Fiona Loudon, who he married in 1992 and they had a daughter, Ella, the same year.
The marriage didn’t last, however, and by the time Daniel was making Our Friends in the North — in 1996 — he was a single man again.
From that point he immersed himself in his work, working on several projects a year that ranged from highly respectable drama to trash TV horror.
His first leading role in the UK came the following year with his portrayal of George Dyer, the intimate friend of painter Francis Bacon (played by Derek Jacobi) in Love Is the Devil.
Film audiences got their first real taste of Daniel in 2001 when he took a part in the action-packed summer blockbuster, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, playing Angelina Jolie’s former lover and present rival.
For those who had followed his career to that point, it was an unexpected choice.
“I like to spice up my parts as much as I can,” he reasons. “There’s always the issue of money — yes, they pay more in America, but it’s not that clearcut.
“I did Tomb Raider because I love going to big movies at the multiplex, getting my popcorn and nachos and sitting in the front row, and I wanted to be in one of those movies.
“But it didn’t turn out to be what I wanted — it wasn’t a bad experience, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.”
Not surprisingly, he moved on to a very different style of movie after that, alongside Tom Hanks in The Road to Perdition. Daniel played the spoilt son of an Al Capone-era mob boss (played by Paul Newman) whose hasty, violent actions cause Tom to turn his back on his Mafia lifestyle with devastating consequences for his family.
He would appear in many more challenging and thought-provoking roles over the next few years, most notably as Ted Hughes, poet and husband to Sylvia Plath (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) in the biopic Sylvia, but it was his lead role as the coke dealer with no name in Layer Cake that probably first brought him to the attention of Bond’s casting directors.
In that film Daniel showed he could mix sharp suits with handling a weapon, although he is outspoken about the use of handguns in movies.
“I hate handguns. Handguns are used to shoot people and as long as they are around, people will shoot each other. That’s a simple fact. I’ve seen a bullet wound and it was a mess. It was on a shoot and it scared me. Bullets have a nasty habit of finding their target and that’s what’s scary about them.”
Two more roles to boost his Bond credentials followed, as one of the Israeli assassins hired to avenge the 1972 Olympic killings in Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and as an Oxford historian plunged into the serious business of finding Stalin’s secret diaries from under the noses of the KGB in the BBC1 thriller, Archangel.
The people charged with finding a new 007 liked that storyline, and within the year Daniel had beaten off competition from Clive Owen, Hugh Jackman and old schoolmate Ewan McGregor to be unveiled as the new James Bond for Casino Royale.
That is the only one of Fleming’s original Bond books not to have been adapted into a screenplay for the film franchise, as its rights were purchased in 1967 to make a spoof of the film series rather than a real Bond movie. David Niven starred in the lead role in a film that also included Deborah Kerr, Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen and a small role for Ronnie Corbett!
Daniel will bring a freshness to Bond as he is not only the first blond to play the part but is also the first to be born after the start of the film series (Dr No in 1962), and the first to be born after the death of the author Ian Fleming in 1964.
“I want to see it go back to the books and make the films a bit dirtier,” says Daniel of what type of Bond he will be.
“I just wanted to see him make a few mistakes, to make the audience believe that it’s all going to go wrong and then when it goes right it’s much more exciting.
“That said, I’m a Bond fan and if I go and see a Bond movie there are certain things I think should be in it. And they’re there. We’ve got them in spades.”
With Daniel having already signed on for his second movie in the famous tuxedo (scheduled for release in May 2008), audiences can expect the ride to be a thrilling one.
“As far as I’m concerned, I want to be nowhere else. It’s difficult in film because everybody wants to make a safe bet with roles. But if you are going to do stuff then you should be getting strong reactions. I don’t want audiences to be just going, ‘Yeah, that’s all right.’”
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