Daniel Craig names the “worst mistake” of his career
Even before Daniel Craig got one of the most coveted jobs in cinema, playing James Bond in five movies, he’d already established himself as one of the best British actors of his generation. Starring in the BBC drama Our Friends in the North saw the actor become a promising talent, and his efforts in the likes of Layer Cake and Munich set him up for success as 007.
However, like any actor, Craig has also had his fair share of stinkers throughout his time on screen. For every Knives Out, there’s a Dream House; for every The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there’s a Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the video game film adaptation starring Angelina Jolie, a movie that Craig actually has no fine memories of at all.
“On something like Tomb Raider, you’re beholden to the fact that they didn’t have a script,” he once told Female First. “So that’s as simple as that. You can’t start a film without a script. Tomb Raider slowed things down for me. It was the worst mistake I’ve made.” Well, that’s a big dent to fans of the video game adaptation.
While the actor admitted that the mistake served as a “good lesson”, he couldn’t help but further rip it to shreds. “The script on that was all over the fucking place,” he added, “waffling on about eight-foot fucking green monkeys or some such bollocks, and I could just never get my head around what was supposed to be going on.”
Craig went on to suggest that Jolie actually got the worst of having to star in Tomb Raider, simply for the fact that she had to be in it more. “Angie had it worse; she was in every scene and had to take all the shit afterwards,” Craig said, adding, “I should never have said yes. I felt like a bit of a spare prick at a wedding throughout. I probably looked like one too.”
Jolie herself had previously expressed her regret about Tomb Raider, pointing out problems with the script and how the producers and writers were just never able to bring Lara Croft to the screen as she should have been. “I wasn’t satisfied with it,” she told Black Film. “Through the making of that film, we were all still trying to figure out how things worked, and we were trying to make the video game into a person.”
Jolie continued, “But still, it was the video game, and still, she was a video vixen, and she wasn’t quite a solid woman with emotions and feelings. Even the way she looked wasn’t to me sexy and real enough. So there were a lot of things, and we couldn’t adjust to everything right.” So it’s fair to say that both the stars of Tomb Raider were less than impressed with the way things turned out for more-than-understandable reasons.
Check out the film’s trailer below.
