Film Fatale

What does Daniel Craig have to do--kill a guy--before all the whiners accept him as the new James Bond?

ABC online has the brief on his interview with Entertainment Weekly. And the September issue of Esquire's got a good profile of him online. (I like David Katz's description of Craig's "crazy blue" eyes--yes, he is a rather intimidating looking man.) "I think there has to be an element of cruelty," says Craig of his Bond. "Certain things he does should be questionable. I think you should go, 'Fuck, that's not nice.' He is an assassin."

Is it not enough that he's the first Bond who's got stage cred ("Angels in America"), indie film cred (THE MOTHER, LOVE IS THE DEVIL), and serious menace (LAYER CAKE)? And how nice is it that an actor who follows the Harvey Keitel/Ewan McGregor tradition of Full Frontal Acting actually has something to front.

If anything, Craig is overqualified to play Bond. As an actor, I mean.

I wonder if the lingering resistance to Craig-as-Bond has to do with his looks (rough-hewn-handsome), his perceived class (Non-U/working) rather than public school-type/Eton-boy. Or is there some unspoken homophobia in play here -- Craig has played numerous gay and bisexual characters and done some unusually explicit man/man sex scenes.

Says Craig,

"I watched every single Bond movie three or four times, taking in everything I could about how the character had been portrayed in the past, then threw all that away once I started doing the role. There's no point in making this movie unless it's different. It'd be a waste of time unless we took Bond to a place he'd never been before."

And here's a quote from the Esquire piece. CASINO ROYAL director Martin Campbell promises that the movie will be not a fantasy spy film containing "sharks with laser beams." Well, we can hardly do worse than MOONRAKER, can we?

Before the announcement was made, I was hoping that Colin Salmon--the sophisticated, voice-sexy actor who plays Judi Dench's right hand man--would be named the new 007. Only later did I read that Salmon had portrayed Bond while the producers were screen testing various Bond Girls.

Casino Royale Web site: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/casinoroyale/site