Interivew: Daniel Craig talks Bond, baddies and Broadway

Spectre may have been released on Monday but it will be this weekend which will determines its fortuntes. It took £4.1m in its opening night in the UK - released 11 days before its premier in the US - but still has some way to go to beat the £103m earned by its predecessor, Skyfall, which was the biggest grossing film in British history and made $1.1bn worldwide.

Spectre - 24 essential Bond facts

It’s three years since Daniel Craig last appeared on the big screen, but far from sitting back and enjoying some down time between 2012 and now, he’s been busy working on Spectre - the 24th movie in the Bond franchise and the follow-up to the global smash Skyfall, which raked in over 1 billion US dollars at the box office.

“This has been two years in the making, so realistically speaking, I went from Skyfall onto this. There wasn’t a gap for me,” says Craig, looking relaxed in jeans, a white T-shirt and blue cardigan. “It may appear there was, but I’ve been working on this for so long.”

The remit for Spectre was simple.

“We wanted it to be better than Skyfall,” states Craig. “We didn’t have a choice; we had to be bigger and better. With Skyfall, we set something in motion, and we wanted to go a bit further with it and experiment a bit more.”

The 47-year-old actor, who debuted as 007 in 2006’s Casino Royale (and who can forget those still-iconic shots of Craig in those light blue swimming trunks?), admits Mike Myers’ Austin Powers movies made life difficult for the franchise.

“He did such a great job of parodying all of the old Bond and spy movies that you couldn’t make jokes about Bond without it feeling like it was parody, but we’ve spent a huge amount of time on this movie just trying to find the humour.”

And with Spectre, he and the director Sam Mendes, who reunited following the success of Skyfall, felt the time was right to nod to the Bond films of old.

“We could work with a slightly different style from the other films I’ve done. The film is very individual but also harks back a little to what has gone before in the Bond films of the Sixties and Seventies,” explains Cheshire-born Craig, who makes his fourth outing in the film as the MI6 agent with a licence to kill.

Their shared desire to “get back to some of that old-school glamour” and “push it to extremes” is evident, from the cars and gadgets, to the inexplicable amount of costume changes. “It’s a Bond movie. You’ve got to make it look as beautiful and as glamorous as possible, and hopefully you tick all the boxes,” the star remarks.

In Spectre, a cryptic message form the past sends James Bond on a rogue mission to Mexico City, the setting for one of the most impressive opening sequences in the franchise’s 53-year history.

And that’s just for starters, with the action swiftly moving on to Rome, where Bond meets Mafioso widow Lucia Sciarra (Monica Bellucci), then the slopes of Austria where he finds Doctor Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), and the parched landscape of the African desert.

“Skyfall was an entirely reactive movie, as far as Bond was concerned. In the first sequence, he was pursuing somebody with all his old focus and drive, but he gets shot before the credits even roll, and for the rest of the movie, he’s one step behind Javier Bardem’s character, Silva,” explains Mendes. “You could even argue that at the end of Skyfall, he’s failed. He’s not kept M alive, hence this time I wanted to give him a chance of redemption.”

Aided by Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw), Bond has to contend with Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott) - the man appointed head of the Centre For National Security, who questions the need for field agents in this day and age - while also attempting to unearth the origins and meaning of a sinister group known as Spectre.

“Having Spectre in the film opens up lots of avenues for us to explore,” notes Craig. “Having this organisation allows us to be both traditional, while also bringing in something very new.”

Every Bond villain needs a henchman of course, and in this movie it’s Hinx, played by the wrestler-turned-actor Dave Bautista.

Craig recalls accidentally hitting his herculean co-star on the nose during a stunt sequence set on a speeding train.

“I thought he’d come after me, but he was so sweet about it. He said, ‘Look, it’s happened before. Don’t worry about it’,” reveals the actor, who likes to keep the stunts “as real and fresh as possible”.

“We try to do stuff that we don’t think people have seen before, but having someone like Dave, who spent most of his career being thrown around and throwing other people around, he really knows what he’s doing and he’s incredibly safe. I’m obviously the one that isn’t safe,” he adds with a grin. “But he moves so quickly and is so agile, and for me, I think the sequences with him are all the more terrifying because of his presence.”

Naturally, the Bond franchise has its loyal fans, some of whom have been known to mix fact with fiction.

Asked if he’s ever experienced any overly-zealous fans attempting to ‘take Bond on’, Craig smiles and says: “Sometimes, but it’s OK. You just smile sweetly, it’s all good. Sometimes people also say, ‘You look like Daniel Craig’, and I’ll say, ‘Really? Thank you’.”

He and wife Rachel Weisz, who won an Oscar for her role in 2005’s The Constant Gardener, are one of Hollywood’s most private couples, but he doesn’t ever regret taking on one of cinema’s most iconic roles.

“No, not for a minute,” insists the actor, who has a daughter, Ella, from his first marriage to actress Fiona Loudon.

“I was aware of that [the loss of privacy that could come with the role] going in, and I’ve remained as private as I possibly can,” he adds. “That for me is the most important thing, but I’ve also managed to make the movies, which are also incredibly important to me.”

Next year, he’ll return to the stage for an off Broadway production of Othello. “I’m really looking forward to it, it’s exciting,” remarks Craig, who’ll appear as Iago alongside David Oyelowo, a man who some have tipped to be his 007 successor.

There’s much talk of whether Spectre marks Craig’s final outing as the iconic spy, and despite the actor making headlines for joking that he’d “rather slash my wrists than play James Bond again”, he refuses to confirm either way - for now.

“I love making these films and the chance to come and make a movie after Skyfall was a huge challenge,” Craig concludes - but he offers up some advice to whoever does get involved with making any future Bond films...

“Just make them better.”

:: Spectre is released today