Daniel Craig is doing a terrific impression of a smiling buffoon. The actor is explaining how he’s rubbish at grinning on demand and is always branded ‘mean and moody’ by the press. So now he’s giving us his best forced smile. It’s not pretty. ‘I’m just not that person,’ he laughs. ‘So people have a perception that I’m grumpy all the time.’
The 43-year-old is currently shooting his third Bond film, Skyfall, and recently starred in the English-language remake of Swedish crime drama The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – the latter was pulled from UAE cinemas at the last minute at the request of director David Fincher (he apparently disagreed with the censor’s cuts). Craig’s latest flick, Dream House opens in the UAE this week and sees him play a tormented father, unsure of whether he’s murdered his own family. Filmed back in 2010, the film is far from Craig’s mind when we meet. Instead, he’s more keen to talk about his looming commitment to play Bond for the third time. Which suits us fine.
You’re about to start shooting the new Bond film. How do you feel about it? Is there a sense of it being a massive undertaking?
Yes, there’s definitely some of that, but I’m genuinely really excited because we’ve got a script. The deciding factor for doing Casino Royale was that they showed me the script and I thought: I’ve got to do this. It’s a totally original story. I read it and it just works as a story. It sounds like a simplistic thing to say, but you read it and you go: ‘Oh yeah, I get that, yeah, and oh, yes, yes, okay,’ and that’s unusual.
It seems that on big productions, the script is sometimes an afterthought.
Yes, and you swear that you’ll never get involved with rubbish like that, and it happens. On Quantum [of Solace], we were stuffed. We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers’ strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, ‘Never again’, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes – and a writer I am not.
You had to rewrite scenes yourself?
Me and the director [Marc Forster] were the ones allowed to do it. You couldn’t employ anyone as a writer, but the actor and director could work on scenes together. We got away with it, but only just. It was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was.
It was still a massive commercial success though. So it wasn’t a failure in that sense.
No, quite. Thankfully it worked. But for me personally, I’d want to do better next time. That’s really important to me.
To give a better performance?
No, the whole film. If you’re going to do that sort of stuff, you’ve just got to get it right. You’ve got to give it your best shot. It’s a Bond movie, you want people to go, ‘Whooah!’ – a sharp intake of breath during a movie is never a bad thing.
Did you have anything to do with getting Sam Mendes on board as director for Skyfall?
I did, yes, I did. He’s English, he’s Cambridge-educated, he’s smart. He’s lived with Bond all his life, he grew up with Bond the way I did. We grew up at exactly the same time, and I said to him, ‘We have to do this together, we have exactly the same reference points, we both like the same Bond movies and we both like the same bits in the same Bond movies we like.’
Did you worry about becoming public property – tabloid fodder – when you took on Bond?
Yes, in some respects it’s unavoidable, you can’t deny it. I still fight with it now. I can’t go to war with paparazzi. [British tabloid] the Daily Mail loves saying – [putting whiny voice on] ‘He never smiles’ – yeah, because I know you’re taking pictures of me, that’s why. Because the Daily Mail comes to mind every time I see a camera.
Did you worry about being seen forever as Bond?
I weighed everything up and the only reason not to do it was fear. The fear of losing everything else. And you can’t not do something because you’re afraid. Well, you can – jumping off cliffs and things like that – but to be afraid of losing something because I was going to play James Bond is kind of nonsense. That’s how I convinced myself. I thought: Even if it goes wrong, hopefully I’ll earn enough money to live on an island when I’m old and get a leathery brown tan!
Rewinding to the start of your career. Did you really leave home in Chester at the age of 16 to join the National Youth Theatre in London? It seems young.
I left Chester in 1985, when it was as depressed as it could be. I left at 16 and spent the summer in London… stayed on people’s floors until they chucked me out. We didn’t have any money, but I managed to scrape it together. It’s terrifying really. My mother gave me a gentle push. School had failed. There wasn’t a lot to do. I wanted to act and she knew that there wasn’t much going in Liverpool and I had to go to London.
Do you wrestle with the more vain side of movie acting? The fact you’re expected to look good?
Me and my very close friend call it ‘modelling’. I don’t find myself particularly good at it. But you find yourself having to model sometimes in movies. Some people are really good at it. But it is part of movie-making. If you’re too aware of yourself I think it goes wrong, I really do. As long as my ears don’t stick out too much, I’m happy. The greatest asset to an actor is their ego, but it’s also their greatest enemy – the ego gives you the guts to get up there and do it, but it’s also the thing that scuppers you because you’ve got to act, you’ve got to communicate, you’ve got to think about what the other person’s thinking, not whether you look good.
As Bond, you’re virtually a pin-up, aren’t you?
The iconography of it is really important. I’ve just spent three or four months on and off with Tom Ford, trying suits on, over and over. It’s important. It just is. You have to have an eye on the look and feel of things. I’m in the gym every day, that’s the truth, I have to be there. I have to start doing it 10 weeks off from filming, otherwise it doesn’t work.
And, as Bond, you have to whip off your top at some point. So vanity surely comes into play?
To answer your question – yes!
Dream House is in cinemas now; read our review on page 60. Skyfall is set for UAE release in November
