The actor who “fucked” James Bond, according to Daniel Craig
Who would win in a hypothetical fight between Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, and James Bond, Britain’s most famous spy with a license to kill? It’s certainly a conundrum to ponder, and admittedly a strangely arousing one, but according to Daniel Craig, his own version of Bond was indeed negatively affected by the bespectacled sex machine from the 1960s.
Craig played 007 in five movies between 2006 and 2021, and while his version of the super spy took some getting used to, there’s little doubt he had made the role his own by the end of the 15-year period. He was the first blonde Bond, for one thing, and he was also the first to step away from many of the tropes that made the character so loved for generations.
It was a much more serious portrayal, with little of the comedy that Roger Moore brought and only fragments of Sean Connery’s debonair Playboy of the early 1960s. But his was a tough, multi-layered Bond, more affected by the modern world and far more vulnerable to emotion than we’d seen before.
Then in 2021, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, his last movie No Time to Die was released and proved that, actually, it was indeed time to die, in a fairly explosive fashion, allowing Craig to break free from the shackles of Q and M and concentrate on being actually a pretty bloody good actor in the likes of Knives Out and Luca Guadagnino’s Queer.
But back to the early days, and before the release of Casino Royale, Craig’s first outing as Bond, when the world waited to see what the previously fairly unknown actor would bring to one of the biggest franchises in film. Reflecting on his early days when he spent months trying to work out how to best step into those hallowed shoes, Craig said: “I was given this chance by Barbara and Michael (Broccoli), which is the first of the books, and the conceit is we began again, but I couldn’t come in and pretend to be James Bond, because everyone knows Bond as Pierce or Roger or Timothy or Sean.
Adding, “I couldn’t come in and go, ‘Hmm, Martini,’ or whatever. It’s not who I am, and how I kind of approach things.”
Which is fair enough. But perhaps an unlikely source of inspiration, or actually whatever the opposite of inspiration might be, was the man behind Wayne’s World, SNL actor Mike Myers (not the Halloween serial killer) and more specifically his spoof franchise Austin Powers, which had reached a third movie with Goldmember just three years before Casino Royale began filming. And it was thanks to all the Bond references in those films that Craig’s character was far more straightlaced than perhaps originally planned.
He told the MI6 website: “The truth of it is that I always had this plan in my head that we got to make them and begin them again and bring all that back in, but it had to happen the way it did. I can’t see it happening any other way. We had to destroy the myth because Mike Myers fucked us – I am a huge Mike Myers fan, so don’t get me wrong – but he kind of fucked us; made it impossible to do the gags.”
Imagine the look on poor Austin’s face if he ever read that, bless him.
