Renewing The Bond

It’s a Friday afternoon in Soho and the streets of London’s artistic neighbourhood are busy. Hidden in an alley, between the music stores, book­shops and theatres that mark the borders with the West End theatre district, is the luxurious hotel where I’m to meet Daniel Craig to discuss his second James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. The Soho Hotel was not chosen at random. Many years ago, in these same streets, a young Daniel Wroughton Craig earned a living work­­ing in restaurants so he could pursue his dream and act at night with the cast of the National Youth Theatre in a ­nearby hall.

Born in Chester in the north-west of England in 1968, Craig was the son of a merchant seaman and an arts teach­­er (they separated when he was four years old). He started acting in school plays when he was very young, encouraged by his moth­er, who took him and his sister to The Everyman Theatre productions in Liv­erpool. He moved to London when he was 16, where he worked at odd jobs while pursuing his acting career..

In 1988 he attended the renowned Guildhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 1991 at age 23.Craig debuted in movies as a South African police officer in The Power of One, and in 1996 he was hired by the BBC to play the lead role in the miniseries Our Friends in the North. It was an extraordinary hit, and Craig became a well-known and sought-after actor in the UK.

Hollywood discovered him in 2001, when he was chosen to co-star with Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider. He then co-starred with Paul Newman and Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition. Craig, interested in deep, complicated roles as well as in action movies, then ap­peared in The Mother, playing a man who has an affair with a woman twice his age, followed by Sylvia, in which Craig played poet Ted Hughes op­posite Gwyneth Paltrow’s Sylvia Plath.

In 2004 he was cast as a cocaine deal­er in Layer Cake, and it was this movie that showed he had what it would take to follow in the steps of Pierce Brosnan, his 007 predecessor. Soon after, he was chosen as the sixth actor to play the legendary and mythical James Bond.

Casino Royale became the most successful James Bond movie of the 21 released to date. As the first blond Bond, the shortest and the only one born after the release of the first 007 movie, Craig’s work in Casino Royale convinced the critics that he is a perfect James Bond.

Quantum of Solace is a sequel, ­beginning just minutes after Casino Royale ends – in movie time. It tells us of Bond’s desperate search to find the man responsible for the death of Vesper Lynd, his doomed love interest from Casino Royale, and also of a battle with the evil entrepreneur Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) who tries to organise a coup d’état in Bolivia so he can take over a huge water reserve in the Andean country.