Profile: Daniel Craig

With the James Bond franchise on ice, Daniel Craig has reinvented himself as Hollywood’s hottest action hero

Just imagine you’re a Hollywood director. You’re casting the sci-fi/western hybrid Cowboys & Aliens, the most eagerly anticipated blockbuster in a summer of sequels. You need a leading man who’ll show there’s a serious movie behind the silly title; one who can hold his own against Harrison Ford. Who are you going to call?

Or how about this one: you’re remaking The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The thriller trilogy has sold 50 million books, and the Swedish-language films have made more than $200 million. All of Hollywood is queuing up for the lead. Who do you choose?

The surprising answer to both is Daniel Craig.

Not many Brits break into Hollywood’s A-team. James McAvoy, who starred in Wanted and X-Men: First Class, is climbing nimbly up from the foothills of fame. Jude Law is on the downhill slope. Daniel Craig, however, is the undisputed king of the hill. In addition to these two blockbusters, he voices a pirate in Spielberg’s 3D animation of Tintin, out in October, and shoots his third James Bond movie later this year. Right now, Craig is a bigger action star than Tom Cruise, a more rugged sex symbol than Brad Pitt and, following lukewarm reviews for The Tourist and the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean, a more credible actor than Johnny Depp.

Not bad for a Northern lad with a broken nose from a broken home, who left school with no A-levels. At Guildhall Drama School he was known as a geek with zero sex appeal. Even his friends called him “Mr Potato Head”.

His early years were unremarkable: a small film role, a few TV parts. It all changed with Our Friends in the North (1996). The BBC epic was a runaway hit and he could have had his pick of TV roles. Instead, despite having to support a young daughter from a failed marriage, he preferred to scrape a living in cinema. “I wanted to be 30 foot across,” he told one interviewer.

A string of arthouse roles followed, notably painter Francis Bacon’s sado-masochistic, drug-addict lover in Love is the Devil (1998). It was an eye-catching part – he spent much of it naked and covered with red paint – and Craig was rewarded with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001). Even by blockbuster standards it was witless, but it had an upside: Angelina Jolie, something of an expert in these matters, called Craig one of the best kissers she’d ever worked with.

After that, Craig chose his roles more carefully: Paul Newman’s son in Road to Perdition (2002); a builder who beds his girlfriend’s mother in Hanif Kureishi’s controversial The Mother (2003); the poet Ted Hughes alongside Gwyneth Paltrow as his tragic wife in Sylvia (2003). And then, in 2004, Craig went stratospheric.

It would be nice to think his sudden fame sprang from strong performances in novelist Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and the superior gangster flick Layer Cake, but gossip columns are not staffed by film buffs. The real reason why Craig’s name flashed round the globe, why the paparazzi camped outside his house and tried to force his car off the road for a picture, was a four-month fling with Kate Moss.

“I’m looking in my wing mirror and it’s like I’m in a 1970s movie,” he told Time Out, one of few instances in which this famously private actor has alluded to his private life. “What freaks me out is civil liberties. It’s about the fact that I get a phone call on a Saturday morning from a tabloid journalist. On my mobile. Where the **** did you get that number from!”

Since then, he’s tried to keep his private life just that. He tends to meet his girlfriends on set. He found actress Heike Makatsch, his partner of seven years before Kate Moss, while filming Obsession (1997).

He is said to have had a fling with Sienna Miller during Layer Cake (2004). On The Jacket (2005) he fell for a beautiful young Japanese-American film producer, Satsuki Mitchell, though he refused to confirm an engagement when they wore matching rings in 2009. Just as well, because when he teamed up with old friend Rachel Weisz on Dream House, a psychological thriller that opens this autumn, that sexual chemistry kicked in again. Weisz has now formally split with her fiancé, Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky, and she and Craig have been snapped spending Christmas together and boogieing in New York nightclubs.

What is it about Craig that makes him irresistible to the world’s most beautiful women? He has those piercing blue eyes. He has a brooding machismo yet is in touch with his feminine side, having been brought up by a single mum and an older sister (he also dressed in drag for a short film promoting women’s rights). And although Craig jokes that he can’t even spell ‘intellectual’, his reading tastes are highbrow, running to poetry and philosophy.

But really, no one who’s seen Casino Royale needs to ask. When Daniel Craig emerged from the sea in those blue swimming trunks, it produced an audible gasp from female viewers. The salt-water spray clung to the most striking torso since Michelangelo laid down his chisel, sculpted out of long training sessions with a naval commando. “I have always enjoyed keeping fit,” he once quipped self-deprecatingly, “between bouts of minor alcoholism.”

There was more to that scene than providing eye-candy: it was also a reference to an earlier Bond era, when Ursula Andress stepped from the surf in a white bikini in Dr No. In his moment, Daniel Craig hadn’t merely redefined 007 as a credible action hero for the Bourne generation. He had also, in a daring reinvention of cinema sexual politics, become the Bond girl as well. The most common selling point for the Cowboys & Aliens online trailers by bloggers seems to be: “Daniel Craig shirtless!”

It’s quite a contradiction. In beefing up for Bond, the serious thespian has become a sex symbol. By being so obstinately private, Craig has only fed speculation about his love life. In rejecting so many roles, Craig has become Hollywood’s most wanted.

“It was wonderful working with Daniel Craig,” says his Cowboys & Aliens co-star Harrison Ford, who does not suffer fools gladly. “He’s a funny, smart guy.” “He is a proper film star,” agrees Matthew Vaughn, Craig’s director on Layer Cake. “The camera sees an intelligence going on behind the eyes all the time.”

And so, 20 years after being dismissed by drama school colleagues, Craig has planted a British flag at the very summit of Mount Hollywood. Even from here, it seems, the only way is up.

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