Daniel Craig knew it was time to reset James Bond with No Time To Die
"Let’s kill my character off and go find another Bond and go find another story," Daniel Craig says
After 15 years and five films, Daniel Craig knew it was time to wrap up his time as James Bond after 2021's No Time To Die. The career move not only allows him to move on to other projects but also enables the Bond franchise to bring on a new (mystery) person for the iconic role and breathe new life into the films.
“Two things, one for myself and one for the franchise,” Craig says in an interview with Los Angeles Times. “One, for the franchise, was that resets start again, which [the franchise] did with me. And I was like, ‘Well, you need to reset again.’ So let’s kill my character off and go find another Bond and go find another story. Start at [age] 23, start at 25, start at 30.”
Craig continues, “The other was so that I could move on. I don’t want to go back. I suppose I should be so lucky if they were to ask me back, but the fact is I need to move on from it. The sacrifice that he makes in the movie was for love and there’s no greater sacrifice. So it seemed like a good thing to end on… I’m very, very fortunate as an actor to have got to a stage in my career where I can now go, ‘You know what? I’m gonna pick and choose.’”
Right out of his time at one franchise, Craig incidentally signed up for another with Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, albeit he seems much happier with this one. Craig appears in the sequel Glass Onion as the detective Benoit Blanc, and is currently strapped in for a third installment of the franchise for Netflix.
Craig does admit that one of his regrets while working on the Bond films was the persistent discussion of his on-set injuries and the general physicality of the role over the creative merits of the films.
“It’s my fault because I kind of didn’t shut up about the fact that I had all these injuries,” Craig says. “I’m pissed off at myself that I ever even spoke about them. I put way more work into the creative side of those movies than I did into the physical side of those movies.”
Craig adds, “The physical side of the movies was just the job. I had to do it. I trained, learned the fights, that’s kind of my brain not working. The rest of it, the look, the feel, the kind of the temperature of the movies, getting Sam Mendes in to direct Skyfall, that’s where the hard work was. Going to the gym is hard work, but it’s not really brain hard work.”