That morning, Craig and the other stars of No Time To Die-Léa Seydoux, Rami Malek, and Lashana Lynch-had appeared on Good Morning America to launch the trailer.
The producers were reminiscing a few weeks later in a hotel in Lower Manhattan. “It’s raised the bar,” Craig finally conceded. “What you’re saying, it’s like, if I say it…” He hesitated. When he realized, he spluttered apologetically for a while. During one long conversation, when I told him that he had managed to imbue a previously vacant character with an inner life, a sense of mortality, and an unquenchable feeling of loss-in short, that he had triumphed as Bond-Craig initially misunderstood what I meant. It’s as if he wants to occupy several spots in the room at once. In real life, everything about Craig is animated, part-sprung. Onscreen, Craig’s face-that beautiful boxer’s face, those gas-ring eyes-can have a worrying stillness while his body moves. He apologized when answering my questions almost as often as he swore. He talked a mile a minute, losing threads and finding others.
When I spent time with him this winter, Craig was warm and voluble in the extreme. You’ve got to leave your ego.”Īll of which means, now that it’s coming to an end, Craig sometimes struggles to comprehend what has happened to him and what he has achieved. Because so many things are going on in your head. “Stop fucking thinking and just fucking act,” Craig said once, like it was an incantation. There was a lot that he simply couldn’t remember. While making No Time To Die, he taped some interviews with Broccoli and Wilson about his years in the role. Craig has spent a lot of his time as James Bond trying not to think at all. “It is not a particularly healthy way to work.” Reckoning with any of this doesn’t actually help if you’re the frontman. “There has always been an element that Bond has been on the wing and a prayer,” Sam Mendes, who directed two of Craig’s 007 movies, told me. There is a slightly demonic, British conviction that it will all work out in the end. The theme tune hasn’t changed for half a century. The offices of Eon Productions, which makes the movies, are a short walk from Buckingham Palace. At the same time, they are weirdly artisanal, bound by tradition, a certain way of doing things. The films go toe to toe with Marvel: Craig’s Skyfall did around the same box office, $1.1 billion, as Iron Man 3.
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