Daniel Craig

Daniel Craig: The Blond Who Broke Bond

When Barbara Broccoli invited Daniel Craig to tea at EON's Piccadilly office in 2004 and offered him James Bond, he hesitated long enough to canvass his friends and to telephone Pierce Brosnan, who told him: "Go for it. Just go for it." The internet was less encouraging. He was blonde, five foot ten, and visibly not the man in the poster; boycott campaigns ran for the length of the production. Two years later *Casino Royale* took $594 million and the argument was over.

A Pub Landlord's Son on the Wirral

Daniel Wroughton Craig was born on 2 March 1968 in Chester, Cheshire, to Carol Olivia Williams, an art teacher, and Timothy Craig, a former Merchant Navy midshipman and steel erector who ended up running pubs. There is Welsh ancestry on one side and a distant French Huguenot minister, Daniel Chamier, on the other. His parents divorced in 1972 and he moved with his sister Lea to the Wirral, attending schools in Hoylake, Frodsham and West Kirby and playing rugby union for Hoylake RFC. He was six when he first went on stage, in a school production of *Oliver!*, and fourteen when he played *Romeo and Juliet* and *Cinderella*.

Learning It the Long Way

Accepted into the National Youth Theatre in 1984, he moved to London and waited tables to pay for it, playing Agamemnon in *Troilus and Cressida* and touring to Valencia and Moscow. He entered the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1988 and graduated in 1991, taught by Colin McCormack of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His screen debut came in 1992 as an Afrikaner in *The Power of One*, and his first serious stage notice in 1993, as Joe in *Angels in America* at the Royal National Theatre. The role that made him was Geordie Peacock in the BBC's *Our Friends in the North* (1996), a study in damage played opposite Christopher Eccleston and Gina McKee.

The Character Actor Years

What followed was a decade of intelligent supporting work and the occasional cheque. He was the Jesuit conspirator John Ballard in *Elizabeth* (1998), Francis Bacon's lover in *Love Is the Devil*, a soldier in *The Trench* (1999). He took *Lara Croft: Tomb Raider* (2001), he later admitted, "only for the money." Then *Road to Perdition* (2002) put him opposite Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, and *Layer Cake* (2004) gave him a lead that Roger Ebert found "fascinating," singling out a "stunningly suave performance." Spielberg used him in *Munich* (2005). EON had been watching since *Our Friends in the North*.

The Blond Bond

Craig's stated aim was to bring "emotional depth" to a character constructed to have none, and the reinvention held for fifteen years. *Casino Royale* (2006) was the highest-grossing Bond film until *Skyfall* and earned him a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor; four of the five surviving previous Bonds backed him publicly, and Sean Connery pronounced him "fantastic, marvelous in the part." *Quantum of Solace* (2008) followed, then *Skyfall* (2012), delayed two years by the studio's financial trouble, then *Spectre* (2015), on which he took a co-producer credit. His first four Bond films grossed roughly $3.5 billion adjusted for inflation. In between he escorted Elizabeth II into the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony in *Happy and Glorious*. *No Time to Die*, held back repeatedly by the pandemic, arrived in 2021 and closed the account on his own terms. Two days before its American release he was given a Hollywood Walk of Fame star at 7007 Hollywood Boulevard, next to Roger Moore's.

Benoit Blanc and the Escape

The exit was already planned. In Rian Johnson's *Knives Out* (2019) he played Benoit Blanc, a Southern-accented private detective of ludicrous fastidiousness, and turned a franchise-sized star into a comic character actor; a Golden Globe nomination followed, and *Glass Onion* (2022) after that, with *Wake Up Dead Man* in development. The more radical departure was *Queer* (2024), Luca Guadagnino's Burroughs adaptation, in which Craig played the wrecked, yearning William Lee. It premiered at Venice and brought Golden Globe, Critics' Choice and Screen Actors Guild nominations. "The reason I wanted to get into cinema was because of movies like this," he said.

The Stage, and the Life Around It

He has never left theatre for long. In 2002 he played opposite Michael Gambon in Caryl Churchill's *A Number* at the Royal Court, earning an Evening Standard award nomination. His Broadway debut came in *A Steady Rain* (2009) with Hugh Jackman, during which curtain appeals raised $1,549,953 for Broadway Cares. *Betrayal* (2013-14), acted with his wife Rachel Weisz, grossed $17.5 million. His Iago opposite David Oyelowo's Othello in 2016 was called "chilling" by *The Daily Telegraph*; his 2022 Broadway Macbeth divided critics, with *Variety* granting "strong moments" but doubting the descent into tyranny and *The Guardian* awarding three stars. In 2015 the United Nations made him its first global advocate for the elimination of mines, Ban Ki-moon telling him: "You have been given a licence to kill, I'm now giving you a licence to save." He was made an honorary Commander in the Royal Navy in 2021 and a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 2022, both ranks his character already held. He married Weisz in 2011, took American citizenship in 2019, supports Liverpool, and has called inheritance "distasteful."

Why Daniel Is Called a Genius

Nobody serious calls Daniel Craig a genius, and he would be the first to reject it. The quality genuinely at work in him is interpretive rather than intellectual, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is rarer than the word suggests. Craig's gift is for locating psychological cost inside characters written without any. Bond had been, for four decades, a fixed comic surface; Craig played him as a man being steadily damaged by his own competence, and did it largely without dialogue, through carriage, breath and a face that withheld more than it offered. That is a physical and technical achievement, not a cerebral one. It consists of stillness, of exact control over how much the audience is permitted to see, and of a willingness to look ugly, frightened or foolish when the part requires it.

The counter-case is easy to make and he has made most of it himself. He took *Tomb Raider* for money and said so. *The Invasion*, *Dream House* and *Cowboys & Aliens* are bad films with no defence available. His Macbeth, the sternest test an English-speaking actor faces, drew respectful but unmistakably qualified reviews. He has never written or directed; his best work has always been unlocked by a strong director, from Martin Campbell to Rian Johnson to Guadagnino. He is a superb instrument in the right hands and an ordinary one in the wrong hands, which is true of almost every actor and is not what genius means.

Legacy

Craig's lasting effect is on a single character, which sounds small until you consider that the character was fifty-three years old and commercially untouchable when he got to it. He made Bond mortal, and every screen spy since has had to reckon with interiority. That he then walked away from it, and spent the following years playing a preposterous detective and a heartbroken addict, is the more instructive part of the story.

Achievements

• Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George — 2022
• Worked as television actor, film actor and actor