Daniel Craig was “dragged kicking and screaming” into making ‘Layer Cake’
While certain stars have floundered following their stints as 007, the blue-eyed heartthrob, Daniel Craig, has gone from strength to strength, not only finding another franchise to helm in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, but he’s also found a balance between taking big roles and pushing himself as a character actor.
While his post-Bond work is certainly worth studying, don’t forget he had a life before MI6. An early success for the future megastar as a leading man was the 2004 movie Layer Cake, where he stars as an unnamed gangster who, after a drug deal goes wrong, goes against the strict social structure of the British underworld.
Though not a runaway financial hit, the film received rave reviews across the board and has been cited as a major reason behind Craig’s casting as Bond, and a sequel directed by Guy Ritchie is supposedly in the works.
Layer Cake was a real turning point in the actor’s life, but it almost didn’t happen. During a career retrospective hosted by Bafta, Craig admitted that he was “dragged kicking and screaming” into making the crime thriller. He was worried that it was going to be too mainstream and dull, but he couldn’t have been further from the truth.
“What it did for me was it freed me up in a way that I couldn’t have imagined,” he revealed, “When I got into it, and I started reading, and I went, ‘God, this is so much fun’. And I kind of allowed myself to enjoy it.”
Despite being set in a bloody and violent world, Layer Cake doesn’t feel like a serious movie. It’s not a comedy by any stretch, but it toes the line between grim realism and movie magic extremely well, exploring themes of class and wealth with a wink and nod to the audience. It doesn’t tell people what they don’t already know about rich people, but it packages this information in a fresh, exciting way.
The title was the debut feature film from Matthew Vaughn, who went on to make X-Men: First Class, Kingsman: The Secret Service, and the criminally underrated Stardust. Vaughn had previously been a producer, working with the aforementioned Mr Ritchie on a number of his early hits. One day, according to Craig, he woke up and decided that he wanted to be where the action was.
“When he says he’s going to do something, he does it, and he is right,” the actor said of the director. “It was the start of this amazing career he has now, and he just said ‘I’m going to direct’ and he did again. He gave me space and I gave him space… We had a ball, and I think it shows.”
Interestingly, Vaughan and Craig almost reunited on the set of Casino Royale, wherein the filmmaker claims he was offered the chance to helm the first in the rebooted Bond series, but the project was ultimately given to GoldenEye director Martin Campbell, a betrayal he still hasn’t gotten over.
