There's this story running around about him saying some really, really stupid things. I guess he was strung out from what was an exhausting shoot, but f*ck's sake man you're an actor, you're the face of the brand - The Brand, the hugely-grossing, fifty-years-and-counting franchise that has basically become to action movies what Doctor Who is to science-fiction television, namely That Thing That Defined It In The Sixties And Then Refused To Die. (Oh, there are so many parallels between Bond and Who - they started within a year of each other, both franchises did Things They'd Never Done Before in 1969, their longest-runner started in the early-to-mid-70s and did seven films/seasons, 1987-9 saw a darker and edgier take on the character and the "death" of the franchise, followed by a wrongheaded dead-ended revival in the mid-90s and then a proper quasi-reboot circa 2005 with that short-haired amusingly-eared actor from Our Friends in the North.)
Anyway... Daniel Craig had some extremely unflattering things to say about the role that made him a household name. And these comments frankly veer straight into the realm of utterly unprofessional. I'm shocked, actually.
Of course this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened.
Everybody knows Sean Connery didn't exactly have the best working relationship with producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli. It was pretty evident from interviews he gave post-Thunderball that he was done with the franchise - and his bloated hide and phoned-in performance in You Only Live Twice proved it. George Lazenby infamously behaved like a dick on the set (though these stories were probably exaggerated - the producers were happy to scapegoat him for the film's "failure" and to sabotage his career after he left them in the unenviable position of having to promote a one-shot Bond) and bolted immediately thereafter, thinking the franchise was shot. According to Roger Moore's book, Bond on Bond,* Timothy Dalton badmouthed the franchise after Licence to Kill, saying he thought the whole shebang was over for good. And, after the fact, Pierce Brosnan has trashed three of his four movies, saying only GoldenEye was particularly memorable.
*The source is mentioned here because I have not been able to find a second source corroborating this, and Moore makes a few factual errors in his book - saying Golden Gun opened in 1980 instead of 1974, saying that he rode a jetski in For Your Eyes Only instead of The Spy Who Loved Me, and calling Denise Richards "Denise Williams."
Now, we'd kind of thought that Daniel Craig had some creative input - especially since Quantum was written on the fly by him and the director after the writers' strike took the nominal writers off the project. So we'd kind of assumed that Craig was onboard with a series of films probing the depths of Bond's Tortured Soul, whether anyone had actually asked for such a thing or not. One wonders now if he took the role thinking it was going to be campy MooreBrosnany - though again, if he expected that, why did Quantum turn out the way it did?
But now he's saying he's sick and tired of it and the only way he'd come back is if the money is there? F*ck's sake, dude. Try being slightly professional?
After this incident I'm going back to my old position, that position being: I don't care how many people blame him for killing the franchise or sucking the fun out of it, Timothy Dalton is the best James Bond ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment