The role Daniel Craig would refuse to play if he was still James Bond: “Stay in my lane”
To say that Daniel Craig has always had a complicated relationship with playing cinema’s most famous super spy would be an understatement. It’s been a bumpy road for the actor from the very start, given the furore that accompanied the announcement of his casting as James Bond in 2006’s Casino Royale. He wound up playing the character in five films over 15 years, and publicly lamented the downsides of the role several times throughout that tenure.
Recently, Craig has also admitted that being the face of Bond for such a long period limited other parts he could play. In fact, he is adamant that one of his most acclaimed roles in years is one he would have refused to contemplate while still playing Bond.
Between 2012’s Skyfall and 2015’s Spectre, Craig’s third and fourth Bond outings, he didn’t star in any other films. While he returned to screens in 2017 with Logan Lucky and Kings, it meant there was a good five-year period when Bond was the only game in town for Craig. During that period, Time Out magazine asked him if he’d consider returning as Bond – and his answer almost blew up the internet.
“I’d rather break this glass and slash my wrists,” said Craig. “No, not at the moment. Not at all. That’s fine. I’m over it at the moment. We’re done. All I want to do is move on.” With the interviewer reeling from such a dramatic quote, Craig added, “If I did another Bond movie, it would only be for the money.” In the end, Craig did return once more in 2021’s No Time To Die, so that paycheque must have been pretty good.
In 2024, Craig admitted that he did try to branch out in his career while playing Bond, but the results were never quite what he wanted them to be. He told The Sunday Times, “Early on with Bond, I thought I had to do other work, but I didn’t. I was becoming a star, whatever that means, and people wanted me in their films.” Instead of feeling a sense of artistic fulfilment from using different tools in his acting arsenal, though, he confessed, “They left me empty.”
Craig claimed it would take him six months to “recover emotionally” from a gruelling Bond film, which left little room for entirely giving himself to other parts. He also believed that the spotlight of being Bond, a character with legions of hardcore fans all over the globe, would lead to controversies if he chose to tackle certain kinds of parts. In fact, he insists he could never have starred as William Lee, the American expat who becomes infatuated with a young US Navy man in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, while audiences still associated him so closely with Bond.
In a damning indictment of our times, Craig is convinced that the actor who plays Bond portraying a gay man in another movie would have been a blazing controversy – and he wanted no part of that. He lamented, “It’s just not a conversation I wanted. I had it all the way through Bond anyway. ‘Could there be this Bond? That Bond?’ So, anything that is going to inflame that conversation? No — life’s too short.”
Ultimately, the thoughtful star told The New York Times that, if he’d been approached about Queer between Bond pictures, “I wouldn’t have done it. I was so wrapped up in Bond…I would have been terrified of doing something like this.”
However, with his days as Bond behind him, Craig finally feels able to break free from the strictures the iconic character placed on him. When asked if he still cares about what the Bond audience’s reaction to a movie like Queer would be, he thought about his answer for a few moments. Then, he mused, “Will the audience respond? You do have to take care of your audience in film, I think, but you can’t really be winking at them while you’re making it.”
