Agent of Change

Blue steel: Actor Daniel Craig is unveiled as the new 007 in the 21st Bond film, Casino Royale. Photo Chris Jackson/Getty Images.

James Bond creator Ian Fleming was reportedly unimpressed when Sean Connery was cast as the first 007; Fleming considered him “unrefined.” The über-Scot eventually proved that he had suavity to spare, but whatever Fleming had sensed in him became the rough-edged rejoinder to the silky-smooth Bond image originally envisioned by the author. Underneath the superspy’s impeccable Savile Row tailoring and his penchant for Dom Perignon ’55 and saki served at 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit lurked a certain undeniable thuggishness. It wasn’t just Connery’s impossibly hairy chest — later spoofed by Austin Powers and his glued-on bearskin rug — but his kiss-kiss-bang-bang ways; he treated villains and Bond Girls with the same offhand, slightly brutal charm.

This mas macho image was reinforced off-screen, in a 1965 Playboy interview in which Connery famously declared, “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong in hitting a woman, though I don’t recommend you do it the same way you hit a man.” (Nice distinction, Sean.)

For better or for worse, Connery has always been the alpha male of the Bonds, and his five successors have been measured against him. Now that Brit actor Daniel Craig has been anointed the star of the upcoming Casino Royale, the urgent question is how the new guy’s, uh, gun stacks up against Connery’s Walther PPK.

The casting of a fresh 007 (“Women want him, men want to be him”) says something about our culture’s prevailing image of manhood. The Bond producers’ messy, drawn-out break-up with Pierce Brosnan (which became official earlier this year) offered plenty of room for speculation about the manly credentials of a new generation of potential Bonds (who mostly turned out to be Celts and colonials: Colin Farrell, Dougray Scott, Gerard Butler, Ioan Gruffudd, Eric Bana, Hugh Jackman). A website called Vote For the Next James Bond allowed the public to express its fickle affections, as fans campaigned for lightweights Hugh Grant (hullo? the most physical thing Grant does is toss his hair around), Orlando Bloom (as usual, looking like a composite picture of all the cutest boys in your Grade 12 class) and Joseph Fiennes (oh, those puppy-dog eyes).

Poor Clive: Bond runner-up Clive Owen. Photo Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

Hardnosed professional bookmakers, meanwhile, were laying odds on Clive Owen, Ewan McGregor and Jude Law. Of these frontrunners, Owen and McGregor are both square-faced blokey blokes. (Owen was just coming off playing a self-made, swaggering bullyboy in Closer, while McGregor had recently finished an extremely butch 30,395-kilometre motorcycle trip.) Only the nanny-tampering Jude Law falls into the too-pretty-for-his-own-good category.

On Friday, this cavalcade of modern maleness was finally topped by Daniel Craig, a 37-year-old blond who embodies tough, blunt sexiness. Though his eyes can flash Anglo-Saxon blue, they are more often buried in that chipped-out-of-granite face. His name has been bandied about with the likes of model Kate Moss and actress Sienna Miller, casting him as a bit of a lad; he’s a northerner who’s gone through hard times, sometimes sleeping rough on park benches when he was a struggling drama student.

Clearly Craig, who is said to prefer a Guinness to a Martini, is the Bond who comes closest to top dog Connery, something that can be proved by a speedy run-through of his predecessors. Putting to one side George Lazenby (an interesting one-off) and Timothy Dalton (a hopeless miscasting), we are left with Roger Moore and Brosnan, who probably come closest to the manicured metrosexual ideals of The Queer Eye for the Straight Bond.

Moore was basically a clothes-hanger, excelling at sophisticated insouciance but lacking any sense of macho menace, especially in the twilight years of the 1980s. Brosnan brought a certain steeliness mixed with self-deprecation, but his physical attractions were tame, combining the beauty of aquiline features, unmussable hair and well-tailored elegance. (It was during Brosnan’s tenure that James switched over to Italian suits.)

Every Bond since Connery has been disappointingly civilized, more interesting inside a tuxedo than out. So what about Craig, Daniel Craig?

He looked natty during the Thames-side press conference that announced his newly granted licence to kill, proving that he cleans up nicely. But there is an underlying sense that this is not his natural state. Craig gives off a glint of unpredictability that suggests a reaction to overgrooming, a distrust of manscaping and salmon-pink shirts.

So have we gone back to old-school, retrosexual maleness for Bond number six? Is the new 007 as raw and unreconstructed as his ’60s progenitor? A look at some of Craig’s roles suggests yes. And no.

The spy who forgot to shave: Craig at the London premiere of the 2002 film Road to Perdition. Photo John Li/Getty Images.

Craig broke into British TV playing hard, semi-criminal northerners, an image that was transferred to Hollywood when he played a just-for-the-hell-of-it mass murderer in Road to Perdition. He demonstrated some familiar Bond qualities in this year’s Layer Cake, combining minimalist modern style and sexy detachment to portray a cocaine dealer who sees his product as a completely neutral commodity.

But Craig’s sense of masculinity has often been complicated, to say the least. In Love is the Devil (1998), Craig played painter Francis Bacon’s bit of rough. As the artist’s muse, model and sadomasochistic partner, Craig was physically imposing, sexually dangerous but emotionally pathetic, a working-class tough at sea in Bacon’s bohemian world.

In 2003’s Sylvia, he played Ted Hughes, aggressively virile Yorkshire poet and errant husband to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Sylvia Plath. For decades, Hughes was the bane of women’s studies grads, who accused his rampaging masculinity of driving Plath to her death. (The Hughes name was chiselled off Plath’s gravestone in Heptonstall so many times that the site had to be rendered tamperproof.) Even playing the “poetic voice of blood and guts,” Craig brought a kind of baffled helplessness to the role, teasing out ambiguities that are still being argued seven years after Hughes’s death.

And then we have The Mother (2003), in which Craig’s character slept with his girlfriend’s 64-year-old mom — not some ageless Continental beauty like Catherine Deneuve or Sophia Loren, mind you, but a dowdy English senior in sensible shoes and an anorak. (Hmm… can we look for a corresponding re-think of the Bond Girl issue?) Craig played a brawny builder doing a reno on the London house of his pensioner-lover’s son, but his performance completely trashed any lingering Lawrencian gamekeeper clichés. It’s typical of Craig’s roles that we can’t tell if his character is wonderfully open-minded in his approach to women or is just a complete opportunist, erotic and otherwise.

In Enduring Love (2004), based on the novel by Ian McEwan, Craig was again brooding and difficult, playing a scientist who views romantic love as a trick of DNA. But he is also one of McEwan’s angsty, morally uncertain London intellectuals, whose life starts to unwind after he fails what he sees as a test of physical courage — a freak accident with a runaway hot-air balloon in which another man is killed.

The casting of Craig as the new Bond seems to reflect a realization that the 43-year-old franchise needs to be shaken, if not stirred, and that new gadgets and bigger explosions will not be enough. It looks as if Craig is being positioned to update Bond, simultaneously going back to Connery’s darker character shadings, while giving them, as producer Barbara Broccoli suggests, a “contemporary edge.”

So Craig can burn up the screen with testosterone. There’s nothing new in suggesting that hyper-masculinity is dangerous. What’s interesting about Craig is that he understands that it’s a threat not just to others, but also to himself. That would make him a self-critiquing Bond — and a perfect icon for 21st-century manhood.

Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg writer.

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Letters:

Thanks for this insightful article! I'm a diehard Bond afficionado, and this is the best analysis of Daniel Craig I've read yet, hands down. Kudos.


Brook Jones
Guelph, Ontario

An absolutely delightful read from beginning to end! Of course, it helped that I agreed with her views of the various Bonds, but no one can deny her writing skills are totally engaging - well done!


Mary Rose
Heraklion, Crete, Greece