Daniel Craig’s Masculine Constructs

In Daniel Craig’s new movie, he’s seen prowling around exotic environs wearing a white suit, drinking too much, and generally doing his best to go to bed with the sexiest visitors around. But the similarities with Craig’s most famous role end there. The movie is “Queer,” Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical novella of the same name. Craig plays the Burroughs avatar, an American writer named Lee, as he cruises for much younger men in postwar Mexico City. (The movie was filmed in Italy, on sets that conjure an atmosphere that’s alternately seedy and gorgeous.)

Craig starred in the past five James Bond films, including, most recently, “No Time to Die,” in 2021. In the years since, he has pursued a variety of roles that seem to mark a conscious break from his Bondian image, whether cavorting around as a tweedy Southern-accented detective in Rian Johnson’s hit Netflix movie series, “Knives Out,” or playing Macbeth on Broadway. But his character in “Queer” is an especially sharp departure. The book, a 1985 sequel to Burroughs’s “Junkie,” centers on Lee’s romance with a young American, played in the film by Drew Starkey. The movie’s sex scenes are about as explicit as any that a major male star has performed onscreen with a male co-star.

Craig, who is now fifty-six, lives with his wife, the actress Rachel Weisz, and their young daughter. Both native Brits, they recently moved back to London after years in New York. Craig is known to be a forthright interview subject, once saying that he would rather “slash his wrists” than play 007 again. (He did another Bond film anyway.) More recently, he has said that he couldn’t care less who succeeds him in the franchise, though at other times he has seemed genuinely emotional about leaving the character behind. He even caused a bit of a stir for telling Variety this month that Netflix should do a longer big-screen release for the forthcoming “Knives Out” mystery, which is scheduled for next fall.

Craig and I met recently at the Chateau Marmont, in West Hollywood. He came dressed informally in baggy light-brown pants and a brown jacket. His hair was a bit shaggy, and he was unshaven. (Some of his very un-Bondian fashion choices, including in a recent ad campaign for the luxury designer Loewe, have been the subject of amused headlines in recent years.) We sat in the hotel’s lobby and had a late lunch. Craig is very informal in person—he appears to genuinely enjoy swearing—but he was focussed and thoughtful, never looking at his phone and giving no mind to two young women who sat close to us and occasionally giggled as they tried to eavesdrop.

In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his experiences making “Queer,” what he wanted to convey with the movie’s sex scenes, and his complicated relationship to James Bond.

How did this project get to you? Luca approached you?

Yeah, Luca came to me. I met him twenty years ago in Rome. I went to some kind of crazy actors’ party overlooking the Colosseum. He came and said hello. And I didn’t really know who he was, but he kind of talked about himself and we made some vague ideas. “It’ll be great. We should work together one day.” Like you do.

You guys all do that.

I mean, that’s what you do, isn’t it? You say, Yeah, sure, what a great idea. But, actually, it worked out. And I’ve been just watching his stuff over the years, thinking how great he is and how he pushes things.

Had you read Burroughs before?

I’d read “Junkie.” Here it’s a little different. I think if you go through a certain kind of university or whatever, college education, you hit Burroughs at some point. It’s a kind of rite-of-passage thing. I don't feel it’s like that in England. But I reread “Junkie” and I read “Queer,” which is, like, a ten-minute read. It was a really easy decision.

Did you study Burroughs’s life? It’s pretty crazy.

It is a crazy life. I mean, I went down the biography route and did that because I think you should. And they’re kind of fascinating. He was what we call, in England, a trust-fund kid.

We say that here, too.

You do? Right. O.K. So he was a kind of trust-fund kid. I mean, he wasn’t a very wealthy trust-fund kid, but he had an income, which is interesting to me in many ways, because it creates a certain type of person.

Say more.

In a sense it can take you both ways. You can become a completely redundant human being, or you can sort of use it and try to expand yourself. And it seems to me he just had a thirst for knowledge. He had really weird, out-there jobs. And then went to university, and then was in Austria, and then really travelled and did lots of things, and then got into drugs and wanted to expand his mind in that way. And as far as his sexuality is concerned, I’ve got no authority on it, but it seems to me kind of like sex and sexuality are not necessarily compatible. I mean, it depends.

I don’t know what you mean.

Well, in this sense that he got married. It was probably more likely that he felt he had to get married. I have no idea, but he probably was gay. And what that meant in the fifties—it was illegal. It was flat-out illegal, but so was being a junkie. So he was kind of an outsider in all ways.

What appealed to you about playing him?

I recognized him.

From people you knew?

Yeah. There is all this footage of him talking on TV shows or whatever, and there’s this voice he puts on, which is more “male.” And that felt like kind of an act, like he was putting that on to say, This is William Burroughs. This is who I am, a very serious literary human being. And then there would be bits of footage I’d catch of him being really off guard, maybe high, maybe whatever. I’m terrible at doing impersonations of people, so that wasn’t going to happen. I just wanted to find somebody that I could tune into. And I felt like I could tune into him because he was someone searching for love.

It felt like you were trying to play a character who was performing in a way, and not totally comfortable in his own skin.

For sure. And I am fascinated by the concept of masculinity, and how artificial it is and how constructed it is.

Do you think that you’re interested in that because you’ve always been interested in it, or because you played the most famous icon of masculinity ever?

No, I have always been interested in it. I would say one of my biggest reservations about playing [Bond] would be the construct of masculinity. It was often very laughable, but you can’t mock it and expect it to work. You have to buy into it.

I mean, the vulnerability of human beings is always very interesting to me. We’re all vulnerable. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter how tough you are, everybody’s vulnerable. But it’s how boys are brought up, how men are expected to behave, how someone like Burroughs was expected to behave.

He’s on the hunt for lust, for love, for whatever. He wants to fuck. He wants to fall in love. He wants everything that city can give him. So he’s a kind of artificial human being walking around, maybe.

That was interesting what you said about Bond. Because the version of the character you played was not self-conscious.

No, and it’s also not my job to judge. I mean, really, it’s kind of the worst thing you can do as an actor, to start judging the character you’re playing.

That’s why you haven’t played Jeffrey Dahmer or something?

That’s case in point. What do you do with it? I mean, it’s like “Downfall.” You ever see “Downfall”?

Yeah, the Hitler movie?

Yeah. It’s hard to have sympathy, but you have got to do it.

Listen, [Bond] is nearly twenty years of my life. When I took it on I was one person. I’m now completely a different person. I’m not doing this movie in response to that. I’m not that small. But I couldn’t have done this movie when I was doing Bond. It would’ve felt kind of, Why? What are you trying to prove?

I read a story about how George Lazenby, when he was doing Bond, showed up to the “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” première—

With a beard.

You know the story?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I know ’em all. [Laughs.] I think he dropped acid or something.

The idea was that you can’t do that if you’re James Bond.

No. Back in the day, no. It sounds very human to me, what he’d done. I think it all got to him. I think he admits to it. I mean, they all talk about it. Pierce [Brosnan] used to call it being the ambassador for a small country.

Did you feel like you couldn’t do certain kinds of projects?

I did at first. [Long pause.] I think it was my personal objective to not let that happen. Because, I mean, just on a psychological level, it’s really important—I don’t let that fucking get to me like that. And whether I did or didn’t manage to do that is kind of a whole thing.

I mean, I have to do my job the best I can. And I loved doing it, don’t get me wrong. People feel fucking passionately about that film series for all of the right reasons. But it’s not my responsibility to kind of . . . All I can do is say, Look, what do you think of this? On the whole, people liked it. So it was good.

Just forgetting Bond, do you feel that becoming really famous when you were in your late thirties changed the experience of it? And that if you were nineteen it would have been different?

Fucking disaster. I don’t think I could have coped with it all. I think I would’ve fallen apart in all the obvious ways. Even at thirty-five or whatever, I dived into a really big, deep, dark hole.

Went to Mexico City, did a lot of drugs.

If only. No, I locked myself away and didn’t come out of my house and I felt paranoid. I mean, with good reason. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean—

“Even paranoids have enemies.” I can’t remember who said it.

Yeah, right. I was really rocked by it, really rocked.

This was after the first Bond movie?

Yeah. Before the first movie, it was, like, He’s really terrible. After the first movie, it was, like, He’s really good. And then the interest in you is so overwhelming. You feel like you’ll never go out again. You’ll never be able to socialize again. I think anybody who becomes famous who’s got half a heart, I think you kind of mourn your previous life. Don’t get me wrong. There’s lots of lovely things that go along with it, but the freedom that you had as a semi-anonymous human being has gone. And then you realize you’ve got to get on with life. You’ve just got to get on with it.

Yeah, it just felt to me that both this new movie and “Knives Out” were, in a way, a response to the Bond experience.

In a way, what I would say is I was suddenly kind of free. When I first started doing Bond, I felt like I had to work in between doing Bond. And I found that at the end of the day I was just too exhausted. It’s two years out of your life and you go, Oh, go and do another project to freshen myself up. And all I found was I couldn’t put any energy into it. So with varying degrees of success, I kind of did these movies that were, like, O.K.

Don’t disrespect “Cowboys & Aliens.”

No, listen. Always read the third act.

Or the first and second.

I thought they were good. I then started chilling out a bit and just went, I’m good. I’ve got money. I don’t need to do anything. Take a break, have a family, do all the things that you need to do. And then, suddenly, I’m not doing Bond anymore, and someone like Rian Johnson comes to me and goes, “Do you want to do something now?” I laughed out loud when I read it, and I was, like, does he really want me to do it? And he went, “Yeah, I want you to do it.” I said, “You want me to do a Southern accent?” And he went, “Yep.”

Does not having the big-screen theatre experience bug you though?

Yeah, I mean, we can talk about that. Of course, it saddens me, especially with movies like “Knives Out.” Like I said, it’s a non-effects movie. It did all the things it should have done, and people went to see it. So, of course, it saddens me that people won’t have that experience. Does it anger me? I don’t think I can go that far. But it saddens me. But we’ll see. I have no idea what the plan is for this third one now, so I don’t know.

Do you still go to movies?

Not often, no.

See, you’re the problem here.

I am the problem. You’re right.

In terms of doing theatre, it seems like something you want to come back to?

Yeah, I do. I love it. I mean, I grew up in the U.K., which is maybe obvious?

Yeah, I figured.

And we had subsidized theatre. What it allowed playwrights and actors and everybody involved to do is incubate great ideas without the pressure of financial investors, or reviews even. I started at a thing called the National Youth Theatre when I was, like, sixteen, which used to put on shows in the West End in the summer when the theatres were dark. So you’d get professional crews, and I was working there. Some of the shows were terrible. Some of the shows were really, really good. And for me, to this day, the thrill of playing a live audience—it’s a drug, man.

What was the first really big movie you did?

The first movie I did was called “The Power of One,” which was a very dubious novel that was very popular in the nineties. It was [directed by] John G. Avildsen. I left drama college, and I went straight to Zimbabwe and spent three, four months filming this Warner Bros. movie. I remember standing on set with somebody patting my face down and someone was lighting a flame and it was just, like, what is going on? I mean, you have no idea. You kind of had to learn on your feet.

You liked that experience?

I was an avid—and still am—an avid movie watcher, but being on a set and suddenly seeing the mechanics of it fascinated me, and still does. In fact, to this day, I have to wear earphones and block everything out. Otherwise, I’ll just sit toward the camera department and I’ll go, “What are you doing?”

Wait, you mean you listen to music or something?

Oh, yeah. I just listen to music and block myself out and don’t talk, because if I talk, all I’ll want to know is what’s going on. I love a movie set. I still get a thrill out of it now.

Yeah, it seems like one thing you really loved about the Bond experience was just how many people went into it, how many things were going on, and the scale of the endeavor.

I used to say it’s rare air. Not that I would boss people around, but I would just say, “Nobody else is fucking doing this. We are the very few people who get the chance to do something like this.” So you have to turn up, you have to be here, because if you can’t turn up for this, you can’t turn up for anything.

Back to your earlier career, you worked with Sam Mendes and Tom Hanks in “Road to Perdition.”

Yeah. I knew Sam vaguely. Sam invited me to the office. He’d done “American Beauty,” as hot as it gets. And he goes, “I’m going to do a movie. I want you to play Paul Newman’s son.” Next thing, I was on a plane to Chicago. Yeah, I mean, I was so arrogant. I felt like I should be there.

Because you thought you were a good actor?

I just thought I could do it. I thought whatever they wanted, I could give it a go. I look back and I go, Oh, God. I mean, every movie I look back on, if I ever kind of glance at any [of my] movies—I try not to—I’m just, like, “Oh, Christ, why did I do that?” Even this one.

But going in, there’s a certain amount of confidence?

Yeah. I’ve got all the confidence going in. I think as a young actor, you have to have a certain amount of arrogance and belief in yourself.

Eventually, I did a TV series for the BBC. I played one character, and it was eleven and a half hours—the longest job I’d ever had. It took a year and a bit to film. It was called “Our Friends in the North.” And I think I learned to act on it. And that’s why I’m always sort of in awe of TV actors, because you shoot quick and you have to get on with it, and there’s no real thinking about it.

How did “Munich” come to you?

Just to even know that you’re on Steven Spielberg’s radar is, like, Oh, wow. So I took the train to Paris, went to the Ritz. I mean, even until that point, when I got in the room, I didn’t know whether it was Steven Spielberg. I mean, during filming, 7/7 happened in London. So it was a very hairy time. There were sniffer dogs on set, and Steven was taking different routes to work every morning. I met Mathieu Kassovitz outside, he was, like, I don’t know what’s going on. He just told me what the film was and I was, like, I’m in. You want me to do this? I’d love to. Don’t meet your heroes unless you have to.

I wanted to return to “Queer,” because while I’m sure it’ll be somewhat of a story that there’s a major Hollywood star and he’s having sex scenes with another man and whatever else, I don’t think it’ll register in the same way that it would’ve twenty years ago.

Well, expand on what you mean.

When I was watching the movie, I thought, O.K., this feels normal.

Because it is. [Laughs.]

Exactly. I didn’t phrase that as well as I should’ve.

I mean, in many ways, his sexuality is the least interesting thing to me. It’s, like, that’s what people do. So he’s trying to fall in love, he wants, telepathically, to connect with this human being. And that’s the interesting thing about it. But to be coy about the sex would’ve been, I think, a big mistake, because he was a horny individual who wanted to have sex with somebody and fuck. I mean, not have beautiful music and kissing and drifting away—like, he wants to fuck. And that’s what people do.

I have no comment.

O.K. [Laughs.]

One of the aspects of the movie that I thought was so interesting, which I feel is not displayed in a lot of movies, is not the sex per se but how grasping and desperate he is. And that just felt so human.

Yeah. it’s complicated. Desire is so complicated. I remember reading somewhere, it’s, like, the whole deal of psychologically analyzing somebody, you can get a read on someone fairly quickly, but their sexuality is deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, and individual as a fingerprint. And that is fascinating to me. That was the juicy bit, the delicious part playing the role.

For a movie like that, how much time do you have to research it?

I have the privilege now of deciding that more than I have ever done. I wouldn’t want to have less than three months to prepare for something like that—that would be cutting it down to the wire. And then, once you start, you’ve got to kind of just hit it, hit it, and hit it. And there’s an accent. I kind of had to do an accent. I had to figure out what that voice was—all of those things.

As someone who’s done so many different accents, what is your process for that?

I have a guy, Daniel. He’s got a cupboard full of them. We work very closely together, and we read everything but the script. I do that separately, because I don’t want to overuse the script. You can really fuck it, because it’s like you’ve said it too many times. So I then learn it later, and hopefully it’s coming out fresh.

Wait, so you and the accent coach will just read random things, but in the accent?

There’s a little bit of Tennessee Williams in there, because it’s, like, why not?

I thought that was for “Knives Out.”

Yes, but actually I did read some Tennessee for this. When you read Tennessee, there’s a really lovely cadence to it, which is fun. And I love the . . . what’s the right word? In English, you say, like, a cheekiness. There’s a naughtiness. He is always slightly winking when he’s writing. And I like that because that felt to me a more interesting side of Burroughs that I felt was in “Queer” that wasn’t necessarily in the person that you would see when he was interviewed.

Interesting that you and the accent coach didn’t want to go to the script a million times. Do you feel that way about rehearsing with other actors generally?

Yeah, you can work too hard on something, and then it comes to the day of shooting and you’ve blown it. You can do it brilliantly in your living room, but the only place that really matters is on set. I learn, really learn it, but I don’t try to perform it. And also because you’re working opposite somebody, an actor. The brilliant actors, what they give back is what you react to.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m asking whether directors are not important, but—

Are they important? No, they’re not important. They get in the fucking way. [Laughs.]

Yeah, they get too much credit.

[In a sardonic voice.] Way too much. Back in Old Hollywood, they got hired on the first day and sacked on the last day. They were not involved with the editing. “Now get the fuck out.”

Do you feel that your performances and how the director influences them are more about talking through the character beforehand?

I mean, ultimately, yes. And that can be a glorious experience or it can be kind of crippling. Directors will want something out of you and that’s it. And you have a decision to make. You’re going to go, O.K., I’m going to bow into this, or I’m going to fight my way all the way through this movie. Now, sometimes the fight is not a bad thing. Sometimes the fight can bring out something else. It’s not always pleasant, but you’ve got to kind of decide. I mean, I’ve certainly in the past just gone, I can’t be bothered. And the movie shows it, and then sometimes I’ve fought and it doesn’t work, either. You never really know. You’ve got to get that balance.

Luca always has guests arriving. Drew had this young kid who was driving him, and he came up to me and went, “The script’s great.” I went, “Who gave you the fucking script?” Luca’s given him the script because Luca doesn’t care. And so I’m an English guy, I’ve got a ramrod up my arse. So I had to kind of relax. That’s the atmosphere he’s laying out. So it’s not just that he’s a director directing, it’s like everything else that goes along with that.

Do you want to direct?

No, no, no.

You did say you were so interested in the different things going on on a movie set.

But I can go home at night and nobody calls me. And when you’re a director, you go home at night, the fucking phone doesn’t stop going till three o’clock in the morning.

Is that true? Nobody calls you when you go home?

Well, I don’t answer the phone. I don’t have to. If I was a director, I’d have to answer the phone.

But when you were on a Bond movie, and a new director’s coming in and you’re the star of this giant production, you didn’t feel like, in some sense, it’s on you?

But it’s my job to lead from the front. What films need, and what films need today more than they’ve ever needed in the past, are great producers.

Why is that?

Because great producers handle personalities, and they handle the mechanics of a movie, and they handle all the things that go wrong and encourage all the things that go right. And there’s a dearth of them now, because they’ve all been sacked or they’ve all been whatever, because the industry is doing what it’s doing. There are still great producers around. But that’s the job.

Do you like that part of it, though?

I mean, I don’t have a choice. I’d rather not. [The producer] Barbara [Broccoli] gave me this huge amount of responsibility. She sort of pushed me to the front and said, “You talk.”

Like, to the crew or whatever?

Yeah. I mean, she did that very early on. I’d complain about something and she’d say, “Well, go talk to the head of department.” I’d be, like, O.K. And so I’d have to go and talk to the head of the department, go, I’ve got a problem. What are we going to do about it? And you figure it out. I had no confidence in myself at all, that I could take responsibility.

Because you were saying earlier you did have a certain amount of confidence, like with “Road to Perdition.”

When you realize that Tom Hanks is many things, but he is just an actor, and Paul Newman was many things, beautiful things, but was just an actor. When I was talking to Paul Newman, he was an actor who had all the same fears that I had. I was, like, Oh, right, fuck off. O.K. Everything’s O.K.

But there’s no confidence in it anymore because producers take risks. Good producers take risks.

Nobody has confidence to take risks anymore?

No. Fucking algorithm. Everything’s a fucking algorithm anyway, so there’s no risk involved.

I want to ask you about a maybe-apocryphal story.

Depends how good it is.

After “From Russia with Love” has been released, this woman comes up to Sean Connery and she says, “Can I have an autograph?” And he says, “O.K., fine.” He was a bit of a grumpy guy.

Mm, yeah, yeah.

And he signs the autograph, hands it to her. She says, “No, no, no, no. I want you to sign James Bond, not Sean Connery.” And in this moment it was like something broke in him. Did you ever feel something like that?

I didn’t know that story, but I never did. People say, “Can you put 007?” I would say, no.

Oh, you won’t do it?

I won’t do it. Yeah. If someone comes up to me and says, “Can I have your autograph?” I’m so happy because it’s better than fucking this. [Extends arm to mime taking a selfie.] But they used to say, “Can you put 007?” Nah. People get very upset.

Oh, so that’s happened to you?

Oh, many, many times. I think I’ve done it twice, and there were mitigating circumstances.

But I can’t tell you why. My instinct would just kick in and be, like, no. I mean, I suppose it’s the thing that defines me. I’m not going to deny it. You know what I mean? It’s been a seminal part of my life, but internally it doesn’t define me. And so therefore connecting it to my name? Someone else will do it one day—wheel of life. It won’t mean shit. ♦