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"  Daniel Craig turned 40 this year, but, really, what other age could he be? He has the face of a boxer and a thief and, oh, yes, a lover, with faint horizontal lines slashing across his cheeks like war paint and a slightly crooked nose, and then\u2014back to that lover thing\u2014blue eyes like, like, like...clich\u00E9s. Think bottomless swimming pools. The word limpid, which I have never used in my life, springs to mind. So try to imagine this head\u2014blond and bristly and beautifully battered\u2014on a two-year-old, if you will. Can&amp;#039;t do it? That&amp;#039;s because Craig is the last manly man. He should always be eating a leg of meat or at least smoking, but he quit when he became James Bond, though he still says, &amp;quot;Sod it&amp;quot; (he is awash in charming Britishisms) and takes a drag from time to time when he&amp;#039;s drinking. And he still drinks, unapologetically, like a man. As Liev Schreiber, who appears alongside Craig in next month&amp;#039;s Defiance, says of his costar&amp;#039;s take on that alpha-metrosexual superspy: &amp;quot;Everyone was, like, `He&amp;#039;s the woman&amp;#039;s Bond,&amp;#039; but I thought he was butch. He retestosterone-ized the whole thing. His Bond might have gotten more emotionally involved with a woman, but he still seemed like a granite man to me.&amp;quot;  Offscreen, in a hotel room in London, Craig is manly but gentlemanly, too, and the tiniest bit nervous. He extends genial-ity and sincerity to a reporter because it&amp;#039;s part of the deal, but it&amp;#039;s as if there were a vibrating electric fence around him: Not too close, please. Still, he is kind about the fact that I and my cursed clip-on microphone are fumbling around his collar (he smells of soap; clean, no aftershave), violating all kinds of boundaries. Throughout our chat, he is both warm and distant. Many people who know Craig describe him in dualities: &amp;quot;He is very serious and very silly,&amp;quot; says Douglas McGrath, who directed him in 2006&amp;#039;s Infamous. He&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;painfully shy&amp;quot; and like an &amp;quot;incredibly gregarious 15-year-old,&amp;quot; Schreiber says. Daniel Craig is James Bond\u2014that singular, all-encompassing identity\u2014and then again, he is much more. Craig is still wearing his secret agent body, having just wrapped Quantum of Solace, the follow-up to his debut Bond, Casino Royale (2006), the one the world bitched about (before picture) and then swooned over (after). &amp;quot;I would be lying if I said there wasn&amp;#039;t some narcissism involved in getting fit for the last [Bond],&amp;quot; he says, gesturing to the body, which is formidable\u2014a wall, really, even clothed in dark jeans and a black cardigan over a gray button-down, all of it fashionably, flatteringly tight. &amp;quot;The way to get seriously fit is to get obsessive, and that&amp;#039;s a dangerous thing,&amp;quot; Craig says, describing the six months of preparation as drudgery: rehearsal, gym, dinner, bed. &amp;quot;I do plan to get seriously unfit for two months, because I&amp;#039;ve got to chill the fuck out. It&amp;#039;s important. I&amp;#039;ve got to read more books.&amp;quot; What&amp;#039;s the last thing Craig read? He pauses. Lengthily. &amp;quot;Fleming,&amp;quot; he says, a little abashed. Ah, Ian Fleming, author of those James Bond books. Casino Royale returned to the very first one and rebirthed Bond as a little tormented, a newly minted agent with a hint of conscience who falls so hard for a fellow spy that he&amp;#039;s prepared to walk away from Her Majesty&amp;#039;s Secret Service. But the girl dies, naturally, right after selling him out, and in Quantum of Solace 007 tries to piece together her betrayal.  The Craig Bond is no parody Bond, no retrograde Austin Powers horndog. The new Bond&amp;#039;s sexual attitude is less Hefner than it is late-era Sex and the City: sex suddenly has meaning and consequence, even at its most playful and semiridiculous, as when Craig is rolling on the carpet, plying information from fetching foreign sources. &amp;quot;Everything, in art or in life, is based on sex and must be based around sex,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what drives us, piques our interest. If you&amp;#039;re making spy movies, which Bond first and foremost is, they have to have sex in them, because people use sex to get their way, to change things or dominate.&amp;quot; The famous scene in Casino Royale, perhaps the moment when women suddenly reawoke to the delights of the often yawn-inducing franchise, was Bond emerging from the crystal-clear Barbados waves in that little blue swimsuit. The image seemed like a witty rewriting of the iconic moment in Dr. No when Ursula Andress made a similar entrance in a pointy bikini; Craig&amp;#039;s do-over sounded a declaration that the sexual voyeurism of the franchise was going to be spread a little more evenly from here on in. The new Bond Girl was Bond. Charmingly, Craig almost blushes when presented with this theory, stammering through a response: &amp;quot;There was no overt\u2014even though me coming out of the water half naked with a...[pause] wearing very little...there was no conscious thought of, Let&amp;#039;s make this about sexual symbolism. It was just kind of the way it panned out.&amp;quot; Yes, it did. Casino Royale made Bond relevant again, earning $594 million worldwide, and redeemed Craig after a season of complaint unleashed by superfans upon the announcement of his casting. That pre-lash included a website called Danielcraigisnotbond.com (really, who has the time?); headlines such as THE NAME&amp;#039;S BLAND...JAMES BLAND; and outrage over the sacrilege of casting a blond in a brunette&amp;#039;s role. Jeffrey Wright, who has starred with Craig in both of his Bond movies and in the 2007 horror remake The Invasion (with Nicole Kidman), recalls the day the world learned that Craig would take the seat. &amp;quot;I said, `Congratulations on your new life,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Wright says. &amp;quot;There was a lot of pressure and criticism and speculation. The thing that most pleased me about the success of the film was that he completely debunked the nonsense.&amp;quot;  Before Bond, Craig was an expert in conveying male damage. In 1998&amp;#039;s Love Is the Devil, he played Francis Bacon&amp;#039;s lover, a low-class criminal lost in a predatory art world. Starring opposite Derek Jacobi, Craig layered heartbreak under thugishness to portray a sympathetic sadist tortured by his own demons, chewing his fingernails to the quick. As Paul Newman&amp;#039;s soulless son in the gangster period piece Road to Perdition (2002), Craig&amp;#039;s blue eyes went dead flat and he held his own against Tom Hanks. In 2003, he was the staggeringly sexy young carpenter who beds a senior citizen widow in The Mother, one of his rare light, sweet roles. There were notable performances in Layer Cake (2004) and Munich (2005), and as Ted Hughes\u2014all fisherman sweaters and mind games\u2014to Gwyneth Paltrow&amp;#039;s Sylvia Plath in Sylvia (2003). When McGrath was casting Infamous\u2014the other film about Truman Capote&amp;#039;s writing of In Cold Blood\u2014he called Paltrow, who has a cameo, to see what she thought of Craig for the part of murderer Perry Smith (Mark Wahlberg and Mark Ruffalo had fallen through). &amp;quot;She thinks the world of him, and she doesn&amp;#039;t always think the world of everybody,&amp;quot; McGrath says. &amp;quot;I needed somebody who would be both persuasively vulnerable and violent. Some people are impossibly sexy but aren&amp;#039;t good enough actors to make you forget that. Daniel&amp;#039;s acting skill is every bit as strong as his sex appeal.&amp;quot;  Soon after Solace, Craig appears in Defiance, a true story of Russian Jewish brothers (Craig, Schreiber, and Jamie Bell) hiding from the Nazis in the Belarusian forest. The film is based on an astonishing undertold piece of history: From the depths of the woods, the once criminal Bielski clan absorbed hundreds of fleeing Jews and established a functioning society, complete with schools and synagogues.  Schreiber recalls his first day on set with Craig, whom he had only encountered at the kind of events where actors nod at one another: &amp;quot;I was in Lithuania wondering what I had gotten myself into. I had just had a child. I was looking at another pot of cream potatoes with bacon on top, and I hear: `Liev! Liev!&amp;#039; And there&amp;#039;s Daniel running toward me with open arms. He gave me the biggest bear hug, and I thought, Okay, this is going to be okay. I&amp;#039;d follow this guy anywhere.&amp;quot; Alexa Davalos, who plays his love interest in Defiance, describes how Craig ensured the set was cleared so that she was comfortable for their sex scene, an epic&amp;#039;s requisite candlelit romp in a chilly tent. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s obviously a handsome creature, but it&amp;#039;s who he is generally that comes through. There&amp;#039;s a strength and a calm that&amp;#039;s very attractive,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s comfortable in his skin. Most actors, myself included, sometimes have a wavering there. It&amp;#039;s not the easiest. He&amp;#039;s very clear.&amp;quot; Clear, but not earnest. Craig is no Method actor, brooding in character for days at a time. &amp;quot;Daniel comes to know people,&amp;quot; says Ed Zwick, who directed Defiance. &amp;quot;He had relationships that were as real with some of the grips as he did with some of his costars. He&amp;#039;s very able and interested in connecting. There are other actors whose process forbids that, who need to be isolated.&amp;quot; Craig, on the other hand, slips in and out of character as the camera turns on and off, and is known for an on-set playfulness that belies the frequent frown. He&amp;#039;s a teaser (Schreiber took some heat for his Russian accent) and accepts payback. &amp;quot;I try to tease him as often as possible about the ball-spanking torture scene in Casino Royale,&amp;quot; McGrath says. That&amp;#039;s the scene in which Craig sits strapped to a bottomless torture chair screaming: &amp;quot;Now the whole world&amp;#039;s gonna know you died scratching my balls!&amp;quot; Adds McGrath: &amp;quot;He takes the work very seriously, but he does not take himself too seriously.&amp;quot; Craig was raised outside the working-class city of Liverpool, and, yes, he&amp;#039;s sick of talking about the Beatles, who went to the same school as his dad. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m still one of John Lennon&amp;#039;s biggest fans, but that was the man as opposed to where he was from. It probably helps that he was a Scouser.&amp;quot; A what? &amp;quot;Someone from Liverpool. It&amp;#039;s a...where the hell is it from? I don&amp;#039;t even know. I should do...&amp;quot; Then he says something about how the word has to do with an Irish stew, but I&amp;#039;m too busy turning over and over the strange allure of the phrase &amp;quot;I should do&amp;quot; to put it together. As Wright says: &amp;quot;I always saw him as just a bloke from Liverpool.&amp;quot; Craig&amp;#039;s father ran a pub, a colorful detail that he, in his slightly tortured way, worries is being made too much of by the press. On goes the electric fence. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;re people writing biographies about me, and it&amp;#039;s a strange thing to have someone make a point out of it. Like: `You grew up in a pub? Ahhh, that must mean something.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; I promise not to reduce his entire childhood to this one fact. &amp;quot;Thank you,&amp;quot; he says. . So here&amp;#039;s what growing up in a pub means to Daniel Craig, according to Daniel Craig: He can still fall asleep with loud noises downstairs. Read nothing more into it, please. Certainly don&amp;#039;t consider the idea that a youth spent in a pub might provoke a certain gregariousness in a person, or that all behavior is amplified and dramatic under the influence of drink, which might spark an interest in performing in a kid who saw again and again the vastness and variety of life. Just ignore that. Craig&amp;#039;s parents divorced when he was four, and he was raised mostly by his mother, an art teacher and theatergoer whom he talks about in reverential terms. &amp;quot;She was really good at her job.&amp;quot; Art? &amp;quot;No, mothering,&amp;quot; he says. It was she who encouraged him to follow acting when he blew his 11-plus, an exam Brits take at 11 years old that streams them into private or state-run schools, another detail he would like you not to dwell on. &amp;quot;I was a bit lost. I think my mother was trying to push the academic side,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;When she saw that it wouldn&amp;#039;t happen, she knew I wanted to act and she pushed that, in that sort of gentle nudging way that you do to encourage somebody, which was: Get out and go do it.&amp;quot; At 16, Craig joined the National Youth Theatre, then studied at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. After graduating in 1991, he made a living as a professional actor and a professional waiter. He says he still can&amp;#039;t go into the kitchen of a restaurant without getting a &amp;quot;twitch.&amp;quot; Brits knew him from television, and Americans first took notice a decade ago when he played a naughty monk plotting against Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth. Talking about acting, Craig sounds, for the first time, unguarded, going into one of his typically rangy, thoughtful expositions. &amp;quot;I do love it. Acting genuinely can move people. We need to have actors to turn around and kick [society] in the face occasionally, so that we all go, `Oh, Jesus Christ, I was asleep there for a moment.&amp;#039; It&amp;#039;s important to make sure we don&amp;#039;t get ourselves into a malaise,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Being famous was a by-product of what I wanted to do. Rather hypocritically, after taking the biggest `being famous&amp;#039; job in the world,&amp;quot; he starts laughing. &amp;quot;But ain&amp;#039;t life wonderful?&amp;quot; So why, exactly, did he want to take on James Bond, and the ensuing discussion, scrutiny, and dissection? &amp;quot;It was a challenge. It was a huge challenge. It was completely off my radar,&amp;quot; Craig says. Having risen to the challenge, the danger now for him is that Bond&amp;#039;s tuxedo becomes a trap.  &amp;quot;People forget because of what Daniel looks like that his pedigree as an actor is a substantial one,&amp;quot; says Schreiber, who noticed that even deep in the Lithuanian forest there were whispers of &amp;quot;Bond!&amp;quot; from crew and locals. &amp;quot;When it got to be too much, he&amp;#039;d just duck inside.&amp;quot; As James Bond, Craig is not only a credible actor; he is, as Wright puts it, &amp;quot;a spokesperson for a franchise.&amp;quot; This means there is a sense of public ownership over him: When he cut his finger on the set of Quantum of Solace, it was reported around the world. His dating life is ever analyzed (he&amp;#039;s been linked in the past to Sienna Miller and Kate Moss), and he seems to be in a continual dialogue with himself about what to reveal. Hence, this response when I ask him if his girlfriend of two years, film producer Satsuki Mitchell, would be present on the Bond red carpet circuit this year as she was the last time around: &amp;quot;If you go, `This is my life, this is my beautiful family, these are my beautiful children, my beautiful mother, my beautiful father, my beautiful house, blah blah, blah,&amp;#039; then it all goes tits up, and they go: `It&amp;#039;s not so beautiful, now is it?&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; By all reports, Craig does have a beautiful daughter, 16-year-old Ella, from a short marriage to a Scottish actress named Fiona Loudon, and he is still with Mitchell. When he says that &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; are taking a much-planned vacation\u2014&amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a military operation to remain private&amp;quot;\u2014Mitchell is presumably the person who makes the event a &amp;quot;we.&amp;quot; Craig&amp;#039;s reluctance to give over entirely to the media has occasionally backfired. In 2007, after the BAFTAs (the British Oscars), a male reporter on a red carpet joked with him, perhaps a touch too lasciviously: &amp;quot;You should have worn your blue shorts. They would have had to give you a BAFTA then.&amp;quot; Presumably not in a teasable mood, having just lost the Best Actor award, Craig responded: &amp;quot;Oh, you&amp;#039;re a fucking fool!&amp;quot; The British media ran DANIEL CRAIG: HOMOPHOBE headlines. (On his blog, the reporter has since noted Craig&amp;#039;s multiple performances as gay characters, writing: &amp;quot;I do think he was a bit of a dick, but so was I.... He&amp;#039;s not anti-gay.&amp;quot;) If Craig attempts to dodge the celebrity machine, it is a symptom of the times. &amp;quot;Look what happened in L.A. with, um, you know, that singer...&amp;quot; Who? &amp;quot;You know, the blond that shaved her head.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s as if Craig dares not utter the name of Britney Spears for fear of conjuring up her particular brand of trouble, the zenith of media obsession. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s [about] wanting someone to have a nervous breakdown in public,&amp;quot; Craig says, growing angry on her behalf, his accent thickening. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just wrong. There has to be some sort of moral compass. It&amp;#039;s not for me or for anybody to make those rules. Everybody should go: `Oh, that&amp;#039;s wrong. Leave her alone, for Christ&amp;#039;s sake.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; While real-life Craig requests some semblance of seriousness, Craig as Bond seems to reflect a new sobriety in the culture, a post-9/11 realignment that includes an end (or at least a dialing down) of frivolity. In Solace, Bond is up against a water crisis, which sounds very Al Gore for a Bond movie. The idea of a politicized 007 makes Craig nervous. &amp;quot;We have to remain in the world of fantasy. As soon as we get political, that means I have to get more politically active, and I&amp;#039;m not sure actors are the right people to [do that], unless they&amp;#039;re really good politicians, like George Clooney, who should be president,&amp;quot; he says, grinning. Craig admits he&amp;#039;s curious about Barack Obama; he sees something genuine in the guy. But he&amp;#039;s wary, too. He squints those beautiful blue eyes while talking about the dangers Obama faces in his rise. &amp;quot;As soon as you gain power, it really changes you,&amp;quot; says Craig, whose unknowability is so clearly linked to his sudden, well-earned ascension from actor to star. When he says that power &amp;quot;makes you into a different person, definitely,&amp;quot; you have to wonder if he&amp;#039;s talking about himself. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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