There was no place in Bourne Bond for pens that explode, jetpacks or coats that transform into giant protective hamster balls. The phobia of space-age gadgets may have subsided towards the end of his reign, but until then everything was raw and real, with credibility as the watchword. Craig suited the tone of his films with his tough-as-nails exterior and Rottweiler’s cantankerous humor. The cuirass sometimes fell, but in moderation, and only when he could take advantage of it, whether it was flirting to make up ground against Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva or laughing in pain as Mads Mikkelsen tortured him in a chair.
All of this and more demonstrates why Craig’s shift in post-Bond energy—which actually began in the twilight of his 007 years, with roles such as idiosyncratic detective Benoit Blanc in daggers in the back (2019)—it’s so interesting, yes, but maybe that’s why it’s been so successful. That’s what happens when you’re a Bond: once you’ve done that, it’s really hard to take the label off. Pierce Brosnan knew his way around Hollywood after his last film as Bond die another day (2002), as well as Timothy Dalton, who has had roles in films such as Fatal Weapon (2007) and most recently in the fifth season of The crown. But it’s still guys you point and think, “Hey look! It’s James Bond!”
But that is not the case with Daniel Craig, who now enters a fun and polite post-Bond era: Blanc is a man (canonically gay) who loves murder parties but also needs to be a judge in RuPaul’s Drag Race. There is much more Blanc in the Belvedere commercial, in the sense that both the “Daniel Craig” of the commercial and the detective of daggers in the back they are constructions of the spectacle.
You might think that, after Bond, Craig wants to have fun of a little frivolity, but There’s a method to all this madness: the more fun the 54-year-old actor enjoys, the sillier he indulges in, and the less we regard him as a stern super-spy. Smart, right? Whatever your reasoning, we are here to support all your dances and in all their forms.
This article was originally published on British version of GQ.
