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Daniel Craig talks Bond in latest GQ magazine

20-Sep-2006 • Casino Royale

Daniel Craig has given an interview about his first James Bond film making experience to GQ magazine.

Hollywood is betting millions that Daniel Craig will soar as the new James Bond.

There was, flanked by Her Majesty's Royal Marines, speeding down the Thames in a boatorcade en route to the big press conference. Fleet Street yawned. If the photo op felt like a bloated, stale affair, well, that's been Bond's problem lately. Pierce Brosnan, for all his charm, was 007-as-Ken-doll. He looked smart in bespoke Brioni, but the guy never threw a believable punch. Then again, why resort to fists when you've got...an invisible car!

But there's reason to be optimistic about Bond's return next month in Casino Royale — based on the Ian Fleming novel that started it all — and it's not just that Q sits this one out. This Casino Royale is 007's origin story, and Craig — a man who is proud of his "very fucking expensive" Cuban-cigar habit who's been linked offscreen to Kate Moss and Sienna Miller, and who it's safe to say has been in a fight before — seems born to play the role. And he also looks pretty good in Brioni. "The tuxedo cost $10,000," he says. "It spoils you completely. When you put on a suit like that, it makes you stand differently."

In addition to seeing Bond make his first kills ("He gets his bollocks knackered," says Craig), there's a nice homage to the past in this film—a shot of Craig emerging from the blue Jamaican sea like Ursula Andress in Dr. No. ("I'm on a fucking beach in the middle of the Bahamas walking out of the water," he says when asked how it felt to be objectified like all those Bond girls of the past. "How do you think I felt? I felt fucking great.") There's also hand-to-hand combat rivaling Sean Connery's train-ride fisticuffs with Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love.

As for British-tabloid reports that Craig, who not so long ago worked as a forklift operator, couldn't drive a stick shift, bollocks again. He taught himself as a kid on his family's beat-up Land Rover. And he's clearly at ease behind the wheel of an Aston Martin DBS — an upgrade of the Bond car from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, re-created here as a V-12 monster with twenty-inch wheels and an aluminum-and-composite racing frame. "I got it up to about 170 the other day," Craig says. Kilometers? "Fuck Off!"

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