Daniel Craig

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In 2021, the English actor Daniel Craig was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It sits at 7007 Hollywood Boulevard, an address that winks at the code number 007. Two days later his final film as that famous spy opened in the United States. His neighbor on the pavement is Roger Moore, another man who wore the same tuxedo.

  The spy is only one corner of a very odd career. The same actor has played killers, poets, soldiers and detectives. He has also stood on stages in London and New York. This documentary asks how a boy from the north of England became the face of a franchise older than he was. It asks why some fans tried to stop him, and what an actor does after a role like that.

  7263271

• 2. Cheshire To London

  ›

  Daniel Wroughton Craig was born on the 2nd of March 1968 in Chester, Cheshire. His mother, Carol Olivia, taught art. His father, Timothy John Wroughton Craig, worked as a midshipman in the Merchant Navy and as a steel erector. The father later ran two Cheshire pubs, the Ring o' Bells in Frodsham and the Boot Inn in Tarporley.

  Craig has an older sister named Lea, born in 1965, and a younger half-brother named Harry, born in 1991. His family tree is part Welsh and distantly French. It includes a Huguenot minister named Daniel Chamier and Sir William Burnaby, the 1st Baronet. His unusual middle name comes from a great-great-grandmother, Grace Matilda Wroughton.

  In 1972 his parents divorced, and Craig moved with his sister and mother to the Wirral Peninsula. He went to primary school in Hoylake and also attended school in Frodsham. Later came Hilbre High School in West Kirby. At sixteen he moved on to Calday Grange Grammar School as a sixth form student. Outside class he played rugby union for Hoylake RFC.

  At the age of six, Craig made his acting debut in a Frodsham Primary School production of Oliver! His taste for serious drama grew from trips with his mother to Liverpool's Everyman Theatre. In 1982, aged fourteen, he took roles in Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella at Hilbre High School.

  In 1984 the National Youth Theatre accepted him, and he moved to London. He paid his way by working part-time in restaurants. His parents came to watch his stage debut as Agamemnon in Troilus And Cressida. Under the director Edward Wilson, the company toured to Valencia and Moscow.

  Craig entered the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1988. His tutor over the three-year course was Colin McCormack, an actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company. He graduated in 1991 with that training behind him and no screen credit to his name.

  483230

• 3. Road To Breakthrough

  ›

  Craig's first screen role came in 1992, when he played an Afrikaner in The Power of One. That year he also took minor parts in the miniseries Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and the shows Covington Cross and Boon. In 1993 he appeared in two episodes each of American and British series. The American ones were Zorro and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. British credits included Heartbeat, where he played Peter Begg, plus Between the Lines, Drop the Dead Donkey and Sharpe's Eagle. In 1995 he appeared in the poorly received Disney film A Kid in King Arthur's Court.

  The BBC drama serial Our Friends in the North arrived in 1996, with Craig as the troubled George 'Geordie' Peacock. His co-stars included Christopher Eccleston, Gina McKee and Mark Strong. The part is generally considered his breakthrough. Strong and Craig had once shared a home, and Craig is godfather to Strong's son Roman. In 1997 Strong, who speaks fluent German, dubbed Craig's voice in the Franco-German drama Obsession. That film needed German spoken with an English accent. Craig led the cast of that story about a love triangle.

  Three films followed in 1998. In Love and Rage he had a supporting part. In Elizabeth he played John Ballard, a Jesuit priest executed over the Babington Plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I. For the BBC film Love Is the Devil, he played George Dyer, a small-time thief who becomes the lover and muse of the painter Francis Bacon. Derek Jacobi played Bacon. In 1999 Craig took the part of Sergeant Telford Winter in The Trench, set in the First World War trenches during the 48 hours before the Battle of the Somme.

  In Some Voices, released in 2000, Craig played a schizophrenic man who falls in love after leaving a psychiatric hospital. Kelly Macdonald played the woman. The same year he co-starred with Toni Collette in the dark comedy Hotel Splendide and appeared in I Dreamed of Africa with Kim Basinger. In 2001 he played the love interest of Angelina Jolie's heroine in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. He later admitted he took that poorly reviewed but commercially successful film purely for the money. Also in 2001 he starred in the four-part Channel 4 drama Sword of Honour.

  Sam Mendes cast him in Road to Perdition in 2002, alongside Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. Craig played Connor Rooney, an Irish mobster and the son of the crime organisation's boss. That year he also played the physicist Werner Heisenberg in the BBC drama Copenhagen. In 2003 he played the poet Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow's Sylvia Plath in Sylvia, and a young lover in The Mother.

  In Layer Cake, directed by Matthew Vaughn, Craig played a London cocaine supplier credited only as XXXX. Kevin Crust of the Los Angeles Times praised his stunningly suave performance, and Roger Ebert found him fascinating. Enduring Love followed, in which a stranger stalks him after they witness a deadly accident. Rhys Ifans played that stranger.

  In 2005 Craig took three supporting film roles. The Jacket starred Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley. In the Hungarian film Fateless he played a United States Army sergeant who befriends a teenage survivor of the concentration camps. In Steven Spielberg's Munich he played a South African driver in a covert Israeli mission to assassinate eleven Palestinians allegedly linked to the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics. He also played an academic who finds Joseph Stalin's supposed notebook in the BBC film Archangel. The next year would bring a role that eclipsed all of these.

  259101112

• 4. Becoming Bond

  ›

  The meeting that changed his career happened at the funeral of the casting director Mary Selway in 2004. Selway had cast Craig in Love Is the Devil. There he met Barbara Broccoli, the long-time Bond co-producer. She invited him to join her for what she called a cup of tea at the producing company EON's Piccadilly office. Over that tea she offered him the part of James Bond. Various sources say EON had noticed him earlier, because of Our Friends in the North in 1996 or Elizabeth in 1998.

  Craig was unsure and resisted at first. Broccoli said in 2012, "There was a period of trying to woo him". He asked friends and colleagues for advice. Most told him, in his words, "there is life after Bond". When he asked Pierce Brosnan at an event, Brosnan told him, "Go for it. Just go for it." Craig called the franchise "a big machine that makes a lot of money". He said he wanted to bring more "emotional depth" to the character. He was also the first Bond actor born after the series began and after the death of Ian Fleming, who wrote the novels.

  His casting still caused a storm. Some fans thought the blond, five foot ten Craig did not match the taller, dark-haired image of earlier Bonds. Internet campaigns voiced displeasure and threatened a boycott throughout the production. Yet four of the five previous Bond actors backed the decision: Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton. In 2008 Connery called Craig "fantastic, marvelous in the part". George Lazenby later gave his approval too. Clive Owen, who had been linked to the role, also defended Craig.

  Casino Royale premiered on the 14th of November 2006 and grossed US$594,239,066 worldwide. That made it the highest-grossing Bond film until Skyfall arrived in 2012. The film rebooted the series. Critics received it favourably, and Craig earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. That same year he was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  272757879

• 5. Five Films As Bond

  ›

  Quantum of Solace, his second Bond film, arrived in 2008 with a video game of its own. Craig lent his voice and likeness to two more games. One was the Wii remake of the 1997 Nintendo 64 shooter GoldenEye 007. The other was James Bond 007: Blood Stone.

  Skyfall was planned for release on the 19th of April 2010. Financial troubles delayed it, and it came out on the 23rd of October 2012. That same year Craig appeared as Bond in the short film Happy and Glorious. In it he escorted Queen Elizabeth II to the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics.

  Spectre began filming in December 2014 and was released on the 26th of October 2015. After adjusting for inflation, his first four Bond films had grossed 3.5 billion dollars worldwide.

  The COVID-19 pandemic delayed his fifth and final outing, No Time to Die. It reached cinemas in September 2021 and drew favourable reviews. Craig says it was his last film as Bond. On both Spectre and No Time to Die he also carried a co-producer credit.

  37697982

• 6. Beyond The Franchise

  ›

  Not every film after Casino Royale went well. In 2007 Craig starred opposite Nicole Kidman in The Invasion, the fourth film version of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers, and it was received badly. That year he also played Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass, adapted from Philip Pullman's novel.

  In 2008 he played a washed-up Hollywood actor looking back on his life in Flashbacks of a Fool, with Emilia Fox. The film got poor notices, but his performance was praised. His last release that year was Defiance. In it he played Tuvia Bielski, who led partisans in the forests of Belarus during the Second World War and saved 1,200 people.

  David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on Stieg Larsson's novel, gave Craig the part of the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. In Cowboys & Aliens he co-starred with Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde. That science fiction Western was based on Scott Mitchell Rosenberg's 2006 graphic novel. In Steven Spielberg's animated The Adventures of Tintin he voiced a pirate, Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine, and the pirate's ancestor Red Rackham. Jim Sheridan's psychological thriller Dream House, with Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts and Marton Csokas, earned mostly negative reviews and low box office.

  In 2015 Craig made an uncredited cameo as a stormtrooper in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In 2017 he joined Steven Soderbergh's comedy Logan Lucky, about two brothers who pull off a heist during a NASCAR race. He also starred beside Halle Berry in Kings, set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. It premiered in September 2017 and reached audiences through the Orchard the following year.

  Rian Johnson's Knives Out, a black comedy murder-mystery, premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and opened in cinemas that November. Craig played Benoit Blanc, a detective investigating the sudden death of a family patriarch. The film earned critical praise and box office success, and Craig received a Golden Globe nomination. In 2022 he returned as Blanc in Glass Onion, a sequel directed by Johnson.

  Queer, from director Luca Guadagnino, premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in 2024. Craig played William Lee in this adaptation of William S. Burroughs's novel. Critics praised his performance. He said, "The reason I wanted to get into cinema was because of movies like this." His work earned nominations for Best Actor at the Golden Globe Awards, the Critics' Choice Movie Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

  A third Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, followed, with Johnson directing once again.

  87929710070

• 7. Back On Stage

  ›

  In November 1993 Craig played Joe in the Royal National Theatre's production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, which ran on the West End. In 1994 he appeared in a filmed production of The Rover. He also performed in Les Grandes Horizontales at the National Theatre Studio, where he first met Rachel Weisz. In 1997 he took a leading role in Hurlyburly, staged at the Old Vic in the West End.

  From September to November 2002, Craig appeared opposite Michael Gambon in the original production of Caryl Churchill's play A Number at the Royal Court Theatre. He played a man cloned twice by his father. That role brought him a nomination for the London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actor.

  His Broadway debut came in autumn 2009 in A Steady Rain, a limited run at the Schoenfeld Theatre with Hugh Jackman. Reviews were positive. In October 2013 he and Weisz opened in a Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, which ran until January 2014. Reviews were mixed, but it grossed 17.5 million dollars and became the second highest earning Broadway play of 2013.

  In late 2016 and early 2017, Craig played Iago opposite David Oyelowo's Othello in a modern production at the Off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop. Diane Snyder of The Daily Telegraph praised his chilling Iago. In 2022 he returned to Broadway as Macbeth opposite Ruth Negga at the Longacre Theatre. Variety judged that he did not fully capture Macbeth's change into a tyrant. Alexis Soloski of The Guardian gave the production three stars out of five. She found him entirely convincing in motion but less persuasive in Macbeth's equivocations.

  1350529521

• 8. Causes And Private Life

  ›

  In 2007 Craig and Prime Minister Tony Blair took part in the United Kingdom's Comic Relief fundraiser, which raised more than 90 million US dollars. That March he also appeared as himself in a BBC Red Nose Day sketch with Catherine Tate, who played her character Elaine Figgis.

  On the 8th of December 2009, Craig's Broadway cast raised 1,549,953 dollars in the 21st annual Gypsy of the Year competition for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. The money came from six weeks of curtain appeals during A Steady Rain. In 2011 he made a short film with Judi Dench, who narrated it, for International Women's Day. The next year he worked with Orbis International in Mongolia to publicise its Flying Eye Hospital. He also supports S.A.F.E. Kenya, which uses street theatre to tackle social issues. The Opportunity Network, which opens educational access to low-income students in New York, is another cause. In August 2014 he signed a letter urging British broadcasters to better represent ethnic minorities.

  In April 2015 the United Nations named Craig its first global advocate for eliminating mines and explosive hazards. He raises awareness for the UN Mine Action Service and seeks political and financial support. Ban Ki-moon, then Secretary-General, told him, "You have been given a licence to kill, I'm now giving you a licence to save." In 2019 Craig appeared in a video with the new Secretary-General, António Guterres. It launched the Safe Ground campaign to turn minefields into playing fields.

  His feelings about politics are blunt. In 2012 he said he disliked and distrusted politicians and refused to get close to them, because doing so aligns an actor with a party. He was especially scathing about Blair, comparing the former prime minister's friends with the title character of Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto. Still, he supported Barack Obama in the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections. Before the 2016 EU referendum he was pictured in a Vote Remain t-shirt reading, "No man is an island. No country by itself." In 2021 he called the idea of inheritance distasteful and said his philosophy is "get rid of it or give it away before you go".

  Craig married the actress Fiona Loudon in 1992, and they had a daughter, Ella, before divorcing in 1994. Ella is now an actress and model. Craig then spent seven years with the German actress Heike Makatsch, until 2004. He was engaged to the film producer Satsuki Mitchell from 2007 until November 2010. He began dating Weisz in December 2010. They married on the 22nd of June 2011 in a private ceremony in New York City with only four guests, including his daughter and her son. A report on the 1st of September 2018 said they had a daughter together.

  In January 2018 Craig bought a Brooklyn house for more than six million US dollars. He is a devoted fan of Liverpool F.C. and also follows rugby. In 2013 he travelled to Australia to watch the British and Irish Lions tour. In 2019 he announced that he had become an American citizen. In September 2021 the Royal Navy made him an honorary Commander, matching Bond's on-screen rank. The 2022 New Year Honours then appointed him a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George for services to film and theatre, the same honour Bond holds.

  9493726926