Daniel Craig’s disastrous first foray into Hollywood: “This is not the career that I want”

Posted On December 19, 2024December 19, 2024

Daniel Craig is one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. As the longest-reigning James Bond, he was practically printing money for the industry between 2006 and 2021, reliably bringing audiences to cinemas even as streaming services lured people to watch movies from home.

Since completing his tenure as the most silent and emotional version of 007, Craig has gone out of his way to distance himself from the character and reset his career. Aside from a newly liberated take on red-carpet fashion, Craig has found other ways to redefine himself, opting for an eclectic mixture of roles that have reminded audiences just how versatile he is as an actor.

He kicked things off with his gleeful turn as Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson’s stellar whodunnit Knives Out in 2019 before reprising the role in Glass Onion three years later. More recently, he’s received the best reviews of his career for playing a thinly-veiled version of the writer William S Burroughs in Luca Guadagnino’s quietly devastating film Queer.

With this recent renaissance and his 15-year stint as an action hero, it’s hard to believe that Craig was almost typecast as a villain at the beginning of his career. After training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he landed a small role as a South African neo-Nazi in Stephen Dorff’s The Power of One in 1992. This opened a small door for him to try his luck in Hollywood, and while it would be easy to look over his filmography at a glance and proclaim that “the rest was history,” that wasn’t quite the case. In fact, that first venture into Hollywood nearly made Craig quit acting altogether.

In a recent interview on the SmartLess podcast, he remembered that early brush with the industry and how he escaped falling into a career he didn’t want. “I was so green and naive,” he said, recalling that he landed in Hollywood with no driver’s licence or credit card and had to call up Warner Bros and beg them to pay for his hotel room.

When he started to book auditions, he realised that he was only ever getting considered for the roles of South African Nazi bad guys like the one he’d played in The Power of One. Soon, there was an offer on the table that would require him to move to Hollywood. The money and job security were relatively good, but something gave him pause.

“I went out, and I did these five auditions,” Craig remembered. “And I went ‘Whoa, no. This is going to go really wrong…’ Where these thoughts came from I have no idea, but it was just like, ‘This is not the career I want.’ So I went home.”

He returned to England and began to get bigger and bigger roles in television. Again, he felt that something was off. He wanted to be in movies, so he pursued film roles until he finally got his big break in the 1998 TV movie Love is a Devil. By the time he landed a role in Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition in 2001, he had the wind at his back.

With this context, it’s no wonder Craig has tried so hard to prevent himself from being typecast post-Bond. Sexy action hero is certainly preferable to South African Nazi, but any actor worth his salt is going to want to portray a range of roles, and Craig has demonstrated at several key junctures in his career that he’s willing to put his livelihood and reputation on the line for the sake of creative freedom.

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