In 2015, while promoting Spectre, Daniel Craig gave a notorious interview to Time Out in which he declared that he would “rather break this glass and slash my wrists” than make another James Bond movie. It would take six years for him to return to the tuxedo and, when the credits rolled on No Time to Die, his future in the role — or lack thereof — was very clear indeed.
There’s no doubt that Craig enjoyed playing James Bond and, certainly, his tenure delivered two of the greatest Bond movies ever in Casino Royale and Skyfall. But it’s also clear that Craig had a slightly difficult relationship with the role in terms of demands on his time and, perhaps more significantly, the demands on his body. He filmed some of Spectre with a broken leg.
In the final years of his Bond career and in the period since, Craig has broken free of the James Bond machine with an array of strange, varied roles. His latest outing is as an American expat who falls in love with a younger man in William S. Burroughs adaptation Queer.
This phase of Craig’s career began in 2017. Two years had passed since Spectre and Craig had taken the opportunity to chill out a little. But he returned to cinemas with a bang, literally, as the hilariously named safe-cracker Joe Bang in Steven Soderbergh’s heist comedy Logan Lucky.
Sporting a bleach-blonde hairdo and a ludicrous snarl of an accent, Craig steals every single scene in which he appears as Bang. Whether it’s his delivery of the word “in-car-cer-a-ted” or the way he drills holes through people with his blue eyes, it’s a remarkable performance that oozes creative freedom.
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That was a part of how Soderbergh convinced Craig to say yes. “He really had carte blanche to build this character any way he wanted,” Soderbergh told GQ. “I said to him: ‘I don’t care how you look. I don’t care how you sound. And you don’t have to do any press if you don’t want to’. Because I know that going on the Bond press tour is, for him, harder than doing the movie.”
But it turned out that Craig’s outsized characterisation in Logan Lucky was just a warm-up for the main event to come. In 2019, Craig took on the lead role of Southern-fried sleuth Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson’s throwback whodunnit Knives Out. He’s the private detective anonymously hired to investigate the death of a wealthy novelist, whose hideous kids are circling his money in the aftermath.
Knives Out is a feat of screenwriting and casting, but nobody either on camera or in the audience is having as much fun as Craig. He originally had to turn down the role due to his obligations to Bond, but a three-month production delay opened up a window for him to work on Knives Out. Just as with Logan Lucky, his freedom — and the joy he takes in that freedom — is evident in every frame.
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Craig, of course, returned to play Benoit Blanc a second time in the 2022 sequel Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. We learned a little more about Blanc’s home life in this movie — including a cameo from Hugh Grant as his partner — but it primarily allowed Craig to flex the muscles of that ludicrous accent even further. It’s no surprise that he’ll be playing the character a third time in 2025 when Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery lands on Netflix.
That brings us to Craig’s current movie — Queer, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Set in 1950s Mexico City, it follows American man William Lee as he becomes infatuated with a discharged US navy man. The film’s reviews are a little mixed, but everyone agrees that Craig does tremendous work. He’s even in the frame for a potential Best Actor nomination at the Oscars.
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“The reason I wanted to get into cinema was because of movies like this,” Craig told The Hollywood Reporter. “Scripts don’t come around like this very often, directors don’t come around like this very often. I didn’t know what the end result would be, but I knew the journey was going to be something else.”
Queer is the latest example of Daniel Craig using the creative and commercial freedom provided by his James Bond tenure to let loose and stretch himself in front of the camera. 20 years after he scored the role of 007 and was pilloried by the internet for his blonde hair, Craig is spinning around and giving two fingers to anyone who would pigeonhole him. And he’s having a tonne of fun in the process.
Queer is in UK cinemas from 13 December.
