Sam Mendes remembers how Daniel Craig gave the “worst audition I’ve ever seen”
There are countless examples of a director and actor being responsible for each other’s successes, with familiar duos such as Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro and Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson qualifying this sentiment. This symbiosis is also true for Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig. Although they haven’t worked together nearly as much as the partnerships above, the fruits of their labour have been highly successful.
It was Mendes who gave Craig his first shot at a critically acclaimed film when he cast the actor as Connor Rooney in 2002’s Road to Perdition, the director’s second feature-length title. This decision would be the beginning of Daniel Craig, the Hollywood star. Famously, his journey culminated in a starring role as James Bond in five blockbusters.
After completing Road to Perdition, Mendes and Craig would stay in touch, and in the middle of his time as Bond, the actor would return the favour to Mendes. Almost a decade later, Craig offered him a way out of the hard-hitting films of his early career via two Bond movies in the shape of 2012’s Skyfall and 2015’s Spectre.
Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life in December 2022, Mendes was asked by host John Wilson what was so special about Daniel Craig. The director responded: “Well, at the time, my eyes were focused firmly on my leading actors who were huge movie stars, so, Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law. And, the studio said to me, ‘Look, you can have your fourth actor, but we can’t afford what we’re paying the other three. Could you find someone who’s not quite such a(n) expensive item on the above-the-line budget?’ So, I thought I better go and look for somebody who can play Paul Newman’s son.”
Mendes recalled Craig’s first audition, which, ironically, was “the worst” he had ever seen: “And I cast around, and Daniel walked into my office one day, and I was struck a) by his kinetic energy – like a coiled spring, b) by his amazing blue eyes, and c) by the fact he did probably the worst audition I’ve ever seen any actor give. He doesn’t like reading, you know, he was all over the shop. But he was so obvious – I’d seen him in other things – that he was incredibly charismatic.”
The host noted that before Road to Perdition, Craig hadn’t yet landed his major breakthrough. At that point, the two stand-outs of his career were his role in the BBC’s acclaimed 1996 series Our Friends in the North and the 2001 video game adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Mendes revealed that the hard-hitting series had first alerted him to Craig’s talent, which allowed him to see past such a disastrous audition. He said: “Tomb Raider was his only movie – big movie – up until that point. But Our Friends in the North was obviously what I’d seen him in, and I thought he was amazing.”
Discussing why the audition was so terrible, Mendes recalled: “Daniel, like a lot of actors, needs the environment, you know, he needs to feel what he’s relating to, just reading to someone in a room, reading to a director in a vacuum. I mean, auditions are terrible things anyway. And the reason I point to it as a turning point, of course, wasn’t what happened in Road to Perdition; it was what happened ten years later.”
Looking back on how Road to Perdition set the scene for the next part of his career, Mendes continued: “Daniel was doing a play in New York – I’d kept in touch with him, and I went to see it – he was doing a play with Hugh Jackman. And we were in the dressing room afterwards, and the play had been great, and Hugh said, ‘Oh, it’s my birthday on Sunday, do you want to come to my party?’ and I said, ‘Sure’. You know, when Hugh Jackman asks you to a party, you say yes.”
He said: “And so, I went, and there I was chatting with Daniel, and he’d had a couple of drinks, and I said, ‘Oh, who’s gonna do the next Bond movie?’ – idly – this was not a leading question, and he went, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you do it?’, and I thought ‘Yeah’, and I just said to him, ‘Yeah, alright’. It sounds ridiculous… It really wasn’t a pitch.”
As with any drunken conversation in which one agrees to something hastily, Mendes woke up the following day realising the gravity of what he had done. Thankfully, the mitigating factor was that the role of James Bond director wasn’t Craig’s “gift” to give, so nothing was set in stone. Despite this saving grace, he still met with the franchise producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. Before too long, Mendes had signed on to the first of his two 007 pictures.
The route to becoming a Bond director was reasonably straightforward. All Mendes had to do was to answer why he desired to make a 007 film. He explained that he wanted to be “the coolest dad in the school” and make something his children could watch and relate to. Ultimately, Mendes was tired of creating “edgy, dark, R-rated” movies and “felt a bit stuck”. He wanted something new.
Signing on the dotted line for the Eon producers culminated in “one of the biggest, most enjoyable challenges” of Mendes’ career, Skyfall. Looking back, the director explained that it’s a movie he loved doing and is still “proud of”.
Concluding, Mendes attributed it all to Daniel Craig: “That all really, I suppose, came out of that first relationship with Daniel all those years before”.
