The new James Bond, Daniel Craig has seen off many contenders to get the role, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent
Ten years ago, in GoldenEye, when Judi Dench took over the role of James Bond's boss M, she played her as an iron maiden who bluntly told Bond: "I think you're a sexist, misogynist dinosaur."
There was ample evidence to support "sexist" and "misogynist" in the first 17 Bond movies, but the producers seemed to be tempting fate by allowing their hero to be described as a dinosaur at a time when the series was making a comeback after the longest break in its history.
It had been six years since the unremarkable Licence to Kill, which featured the seriously miscast Timothy Dalton as the suave secret agent who, to date, has killed 156 people on screen and been intimate with 44 women. And the risk was greater as GoldenEye was introducing a new Bond in Navan man Pierce Brosnan, who was probably best known then for playing the lead in the 1982-87 TV series, Remington Steele.
Happily for all concerned, Brosnan fitted the part like a glove, and more comfortably than any Bond portrayer since the original of the species, Sean Connery. Brosnan was cool, urbane and handsome with just the right flair for the pun-littered throwaway humour that was as characteristic of Bond as his apparently unflappable sexual drive and his penchant for martinis that are shaken, not stirred.
GoldenEye was a hit, and Bond was back with a vengeance at the box office.
Brosnan's next three outings as 007 fared even better, and his last movie in the role, Die Another Day (2002), ranks as the most lucrative in the series, having taken over $300 million (€248 million) on international release.
Then there was a falling-out between Brosnan and the firmly hands-on producers of the series, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson. One report said that they felt Brosnan, now 52, was too old for the role. Another said that Brosnan was looking for too much money to play Bond for the fifth time - reportedly $25 million (€20.1 million)along with 5 per cent of the gross box-office takings.
Brosnan puts Bond firmly behind him in his witty performance as a washed-up assassin in his new film, The Matador. Working on the Bond movies "never felt real to me," he said in a recent interview. "I never felt I had complete ownership of Bond. Because you'd have those stupid one-liners - which I loathed - and I always felt phoney doing them." What was most frustrating, he said, was that producers Broccoli and Wilson "played it so safe - the pomposity and rigmarole they put directors through is astounding".
After this parting of the ways, Broccoli and Wilson embarked on the most extensive and most highly publicised casting quest since the fabled search began to find the ideal screen incarnation of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind back in the late 1930s.
For the best part of 18 months, the media has been awash with rumours as to who would be the new 007. Dozens of names were mentioned, with Clive Owen emerging as an early front-runner until he got an Oscar nomination for Closer this year and chose to pursue his career as a serious actor.
The most ludicrous suggestion was that singer Robbie Williams was in the running, but there were many more plausible contenders: Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Gerard Butler, Eric Bana and Nip/Tuck star and Neighbours alumnus Julian MacMahon. Finally, the list was narrowed down to four candidates: relative unknowns Henry Cavill (22) from Jersey in the Channel Islands and Sam Worthington (29) from Australia; Croatian actor Goran Visnjic (33), who plays Dr Luka Kovac in ER; and critically acclaimed English actor Daniel Craig (37).
ALL THAT FEVERED speculation finally ended shortly after noon in London yesterday when Craig appeared on a naval vessel at Tower Bridge and was confirmed as the new 007 to the world's press. Craig, who will be the first blond Bond (although he has dyed his hair dark for several films), is only the second English actor to land the role, after Roger Moore. Cinema's other Bonds hailed from Scotland (Connery), Australia (George Lazenby), Wales (Dalton) and Ireland (Brosnan).
The biggest surprise about Craig's casting is that he actually wants to become the new James Bond. A serious stage and film actor whose breakthrough came in the riveting BBC TV series Our Friends in the North, Craig has been widely acclaimed for his performances as real-life characters - Francis Bacon's rough trade lover, George Dyer, in Love is the Devil, poet Ted Hughes in Sylvia - and as fictional creations in Road to Perdition, Layer Cake, The Jacket and Enduring Love.
Craig has one of the leading roles in Steven Spielberg's Munich, set against the massacre at the 1972 Olympics and already touted as an Oscar contender before it opens in the US at the end of the year. Consequently, it seemed likely that Craig would not be interested for the same reasons as Clive Owen, and he certainly is taking a major gamble at a time when his star is firmly in the ascendant.
Any actor playing 007 takes the crucial risk of being typecast for life. While Connery and Brosnan cleverly exploited their fame in the Bond movies to cultivate successful careers in a range of other movies, the careers of the other 007 portrayers - Lazenby, Moore and Dalton - never recovered after their Bond days were over.
There are other risks. The 007 series is the longest running in cinema history, but the world has changed radically since Connery first slipped into Bond's tuxedo 43 years ago. How long more will audiences be drawn to the outlandish escapades of a British secret agent introduced by Ian Fleming, a former British naval intelligence commander, in his 1953 novel, Casino Royale? Furthermore, Bond been roundly lampooned in the popular Austin Powers comedies starring Mike Myers, and now there's a rival agent on the block in Jason Bourne, the central character in the Robert Ludlum novels that spawned the hit thrillers, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy.
Played with agreeable low-key style by Matt Damon, who is two years younger than Craig, Bourne is a credible spy for the post-9/11 era, an operator more likely to rely on his wits and brainpower rather than the range of gimmicky gadgets handed to James Bond by the inventor known as Q. The Bourne Supremacy outstripped not only its predecessor but also the most successful Bond movie, Die Another Day, at the US box office. Damon returns to the role in The Bourne Ultimatum, which is planned for release in 2007.
Meanwhile, Craig's debut outing as Bond, Casino Royale, is set for international release on November 17th, 2006, even though it doesn't start shooting until January and the script was only recently handed to Million Dollar Baby writer and Crash director Paul Haggis for a rewrite job.
This Casino Royale should not be confused with the wildly self-indulgent 1967 spoof of the same name, a curiosity piece that had five directors, including Val Guest and John Huston, and went through any number of writers, among them Wolf Mankowitz, Woody Allen, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Billy Wilder, Terry Southern and Peter Sellers.
The producers of the Bond series have entrusted the new Casino Royale to a safe pair of hands in Martin Campbell, the action specialist who directed GoldenEye and the two Zorro movies starring Antonio Banderas.
WORD HAS IT that the new Casino Royale will take Bond back to his formative years, which proved a lucrative strategy for the recent Batman Begins.
Another significant change is that only one of the film's big set-pieces will be shot at the traditional home of the Bond franchise, Pinewood Studios outside London, and most of the film will use a studio in Prague for economic reasons.
Too many changes could have economic repercussions, given that the sheer familiarity of the Bond film formula is a key to its enduring appeal, feeling as comforting as meeting an old friend every few years.
We will expect an elaborate opening action sequence to thrill before the movie settles intoa credit sequence set against stylised treatments of the female form while a popular singer performs the title song on the soundtrack. Former Bond singers have included Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra, Carly Simon, Duran Duran, A-Ha, Madonna, and Shirley Bassey three times; flavour of the year James Blunt would seem a likely choice for the new Bond adventure.
Come to think of it, given Blunt's good looks, extensive popularity, and wartime experience as a soldier in Kosovo, maybe the producers should have given him a screen test. Then again, maybe Blunt's upper-class accent sounds just too posh - even to play James Bond.