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The Name's Craig; Daniel Craig

By Pam Grady
www.filmstew.com
May 13, 2005
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Daniel Craig was in Austin, Texas when his own personal tsunami hit, as London's tabloid, The Sun, unequivocally named the 37-year-old actor -- a virtual unknown outside of art film circles in the States – as Pierce Brosnan's successor in the James Bond franchise. "I got text messages saying, 'Congratulations!'" he remembers, "And I'm like, 'What the f*ck have I won?' I mean, it's big news to me." "There's speculation; names have been bandied about,” he adds. “I'm one of the names and the British decided to call it," he theorizes, adding. "They decided to say it was me, probably just to raise some debate and get the whole thing heated up a bit." FilmStew met up with the affable actor twice, in Park City, where he attended the U.S. premiere of his latest film, Layer Cake, at the Sundance Film Festival and more recently in San Francisco, where the film screened as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. In between, he went from his appearance opposite Adrien Brody in The Jacket going by mostly unnoticed in most reviews to seeing his name in gossip columns on a regular basis, thanks to the Bond connection. The Liverpool native remains remarkably good-humored for someone whose career, at least in the press, has been reduced to that of an ingénue waiting for his big break.
Indeed, in San Francisco, he seemed much more excited at the idea of spending a day in a new city, even if he wasn't going to get to see much of it, with his obligations to the press and the festival. But he managed to break free of the windowless conference rooms of the Ritz-Carlton hotel for an hour so that a publicist's associate could drive him over the Golden Gate Bridge. With his flight scheduled to leave early the next morning, that is a view that will have to do until his next opportunity for a visit. Whether of not Craig ever gets behind the wheel of Bond's Aston Martin, he can afford to be sanguine, because his is a career that is going swimmingly. He made his screen debut in 1992 with a small part in John G. Avildsen's The Power of One, but it was with a 1996 award-winning British miniseries, Our Friends in the North, that followed four friends over the course of 30 years that Craig first made a name for himself in his native England. Stateside, art house fans sat up and took notice when he essayed the sexy, tragic role of George Dyer, Francis Bacon's doomed, rough trade lover in Love Is the Devil.
Since then, he's made the occasional Hollywood movie, appearing opposite Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and as Paul Newman's son in The Road to Perdition, and he's starred on the West End in such plays as Hurlyburly and Angels in America. But it is in the character-driven drama that he's had his biggest impact, playing the poet Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow's Sylvia Plath in Sylvia; a randy handyman bedding both an elderly woman and her daughter in The Mother; and winning a London Film Critics Circle Award for his role as Rhys Ifans' object of obsession in last year's Enduring Love. Currently, he is in Austin, filming Douglas McGrath's Every Word Is True, a drama exploring the intimate relationship that writer Truman Capote developed with the subject of his legendary book In Cold Blood. In it, Craig plays the character that made Robert Blake a star nearly 40 years ago, killer Perry Smith. After that, he will once again try his luck in Hollywood when he takes a role in Vengeance, Steven Spielberg's drama about the aftermath of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
But for now, Craig is concentrating on publicizing Layer Cake. In this British crime drama, the actor plays a nameless drug dealer, a middleman in an organization that stretches deep into English high society. He is a man who thinks he understands the business he's in and he's got a plan and that is to get out with the laundered money he's got safely tucked away. But his boss, Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham), has two last assignments for him: facilitate the sale of a load of stolen Ecstasy and find the missing daughter of Jimmy's society friend Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon).As Michael Corleone discovered in Godfather III, it's not so easy to get out when they keep pulling you back in. Craig almost missed out on the role. In J.J. Connolly's novel on which Layer Cake is based, the character is only 29 years old. But the more director Matthew Vaughn thought about the character and how much he appeared to know about the business he was in, the more the filmmaker became convinced that it called for a more mature actor. "I just felt that this character telling you all the rules – how to do this and how to do that – 29 was too young,” Vaughn recalls. “It would be like, 'F*ck off! Grow up!' I needed someone with more wisdom, more respect, and more integrity, and that's when I thought of [Daniel]. That's what he brought to the package.” For his part, Craig had his own reservations about taking the part. He'd been sent many gangster scripts over the years and would turn them down, put off by the violence. "I mean I'd read them and go, 'God, I can't read this. How am I going to do it?,'" Craig remembers, adding, "I've got nothing against violence in the right place in a movie, but this one really struck me as a great script in a really good condition when it was sent me and I thought, 'Well, I've never done anything like this.' I like the morality of the piece, there's a sort of morality there." He admits, as well, that he was fascinated by the idea of working with Vaughn. Though this was his first film as a director, he's had great success as a producer, notably of Guy Ritchie's black comic crime dramas, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. In fact, Layer Cake was supposed to be a Guy Ritchie film, but when he decided to pass on it, Vaughn decided to take the job himself. "I was just intrigued, because Matthew was directing. I just thought, 'Wow, you've made that step. That's a big step to make. Maybe I should be around when you're doing it,' Craig explains. "And he's a successful moviemaker, he's one of the few successful British moviemakers."
When the two men met to talk about the part, Craig was taken by Vaughn's vision of the film, one that would in some ways hearken back to those stylish Michael Caine films of the 1960s, such as Get Carter or The Ipcress File, and that would make London almost another character in the film. "He was talking about making London feel like London, the glamorous city that it is, not the tourist place with buses and 'There's Big Ben, it must be London,' but to make it as beautiful as it can look," Craig enthuses.
Vaughn was equally relieved to find an actor with whom he felt completely in sync, as he recalls, "When we met, I knew he was definitely right, because we had exactly the same views about how we thought it should be different, how we weren't into violence." "We became a team after about 20 minutes and for me, as a director, when you click with someone and you know they're going to be a team player, you work with them, because you don't want some egotistical guy who thinks he knows it all and makes your life hell." One thing that both men agree on is that the characters in Layer Cake see their business as any other; they could be selling any widget as easily as cocaine. Both point out that many people today are as likely to have a drug dealer's number stashed in their Palm Pilot as they are to have a stock broker.
"That sort of attracted me to [Layer Cake]. I think modern crime pervades all sections of society. I think the successful modern crime is the crime we don't see, because why would they want you to see it?" observes Craig. "They operate as quietly and successfully as possible without making a song and dance about it."
In deciding what parts to take, Craig has certain criteria. He tries to take only parts that interest him and he finds that he's attracted to characters that are in the midst of change or are trying to change the world around them. "And if I've done one job, I try not to repeat that job. I try to keep myself interested, keep myself alive to the job, because I love it. It's precious to me, so I want to try to keep it as interesting and as wonderful as it can be," he says.
But he admits with Layer Cake, the attraction to his anonymous antihero, for both himself and the audience is a bit more visceral. He laughs, "It's sticking it to The Man. I mean, that's it, isn't it? It's getting away with something. Anybody that gets away with a lot of money and screws the government out of a lot of money, we're sort of charitable [towards]. Deep down inside, we're like, "F*cking great!" Anything that sticks it to the government or sticks it to the ruling class, there's something within our nature."