Actor Daniel Craig hates guns but he's a meaner, ruder and less forgiving James Bond than his predecessors, writes Donald Clarke
In Chapter 17 of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, the novel that introduced the world to James Bond, Le Chiffre, a villain of classic foreignness, visits a particularly kinky variety of torture on the world's favourite spy. Bond, his lower garments torn from his body, is forced to sit on (or rather in) an upright chair whose wicker seat has been cut away. Le Chiffre produces a carpet beater, positions it beneath James's gentleman's area and utters a grim warning: "Say goodbye to it, Bond."
In the months following the announcement that he was to succeed Pierce Brosnan in the role of 007, Daniel Craig, a craggy 38-year-old from Cheshire, suffered a comparably unpleasant assault from some sections of the Bond community. The fans did not, you understand, set about his tender parts with a cudgel, but the barbed comments flying about the internet were surely painful enough.
"Some of the stuff that's been said is as close to a playground taunt as you are going to get," Craig remarked. "'You've got big ears!' F**king hell! If you ask anyone who has been bullied, they know it hurts. It is not right."
The complaints tended to come from the majority of the 007 fan-base that formed its impressions of their hero solely from the 20 films produced by the late Cubby Broccoli's Eon Productions over the past 44 years. Though Sean Connery, the original Bond, allowed a streak of raw cruelty to run through his performance, his successors - George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Brosnan - all carried about them the glib suaveness of a head waiter on a cruise ship. For the fans who set up the Daniel Craig is Not Bond website, the new incumbent seemed a little too angry, too craggy, too unrefined.
WITHIN ANOTHER, SMALLER faction of Bondites the news of Craig's appointment was greeted much more positively. Those fundamentalists who revered The Word as revealed in the novels alone saw something of Fleming's original creation in Craig. This is not to say that the actor is himself a racist, sexist near-psychopath with a staggering capacity for strong drink and expensive food. Nobody is suggesting that he would, to quote Bond in Casino Royale, savour a "tang of rape" in his lovemaking. But Craig's performances in films such as Love is the Devil, where he played artist Francis Bacon's rough lover, and in the BBC television series Our Friends in the North, in which he turned up as an enforcer for a Soho pornographer, persuaded the 007 taliban that Daniel might restore some of the meanness of the literary Bond.
OPTIMISM WAS BOLSTERED by the news that Craig's first outing was to be in the first serious cinematic adaptation of Casino Royale. That book had previously been tackled only in the unofficial spoof version of 1967 and no Bond film had paid any serious attention to a source novel since the 1970s.
Daniel Craig comes from a considerably more humble background than James Bond, who, his premature obituary in You Only Live Twice informs us, attended Eton and Fettes. Born in Chester on March 2nd, 1968, the son of a merchant sailor who became a pub landlord, Daniel Craig left school at 16 and made his way to London with hopes of taking to the stage. He had an unspectacular spell at the National Youth Theatre, before winding up at the Guildhall School of Drama alongside such talented contemporaries as Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes.
"When I left drama school the only jobs were for boys in floppy fringes who went to Eton," he said. "I could fit in because I could do a slightly posh accent. But I realised actually I can't really be posh."
Nonetheless, Craig managed to work fairly consistently throughout his 20s. You can spot him in episodes of television shows such as as Sharpe, Heartbeat and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. What really changed things for him was the role of Geordie, the hard man who ends up a convict and then a tramp, in Peter Flannery's epic political saga Our Friends in the North. From then on, Craig found plenty of work from producers seeking an actor capable of showing conviction when drunkenly smashing a chair over a policeman's head. He was Ted Hughes in Sylvia. He was an Israeli tough nut in Steven Spielberg's Munich.
Despite his effective way with his fists on screen, Daniel Craig, unlike Fleming's bluff bruiser, professes himself a peaceable sort at heart. "I hate handguns. Handguns are used to shoot people and as long as they are around, people will shoot each other," he said last year.
Still, he does seem to share Bond's propensity for getting involved in complicated romantic liaisons. It was reported that he fell out with his old buddy Jude Law after having a fling with the bafflingly ubiquitous Sienna Miller, Law's on-off partner.
He has a 13-year-old daughter from his relationship with the actor Fiona Loudon. He has even spent some time entwined with that slim streak of trouble known to tabloids as Kate Moss.
None of which matters a jot if Craig can't cut it on screen. As it happens, Casino Royale, which opens next week, may delight as many members of the 007 taliban as it appals fans of the later films. Monty Norman's classic Bond theme barely appears. There are few complicated gadgets. The villain, played with lascivious glee by Mad Mikkelson, refrains from constructing an underwater lair. And Craig is, indeed, meaner, ruder and less forgiving than any previous movie Bond.
CONSIDERING THE WITHERING effect playing James Bond can have on a career - even Connery had to wait for late middle age to escape its shadow - Craig may greet the positive advance publicity for his performance with mixed emotions. Mind you, there are worse ways of making a living than driving Aston Martins and rolling around the sheets with actors such as Eva Green. He could, however, be forgiven for banning wicker chairs from future sets.
Yes, to the delighted astonishment of Bond purists, that torture scene appears in the new film. Sadly, the carpet beater has been replaced with a knotted rope. Those surviving manufacturers of willow switches hoping for some product placement must have been grievously disappointed.
Casino Royale will open on Thursday