The world of James Bond has often been described as an escapist fantasy. But, that's mostly because none of us ever have to inhabit the character for longer than the runtime of a movie or the length of a novel. To truly live with the 007 persona is a precarious, double-edged emotional rollercoaster. And, while doing a new round of interviews for his latest film, Queer, Daniel Craig has opened up about just how draining each of his James Bond movies were, in retrospect.
Speaking to the U.K.'s Sunday Times, in a new wide-ranging interview, Daniel Craig said “I was so exhausted at the end of a Bond it would take me six months to recover emotionally.”
Craig has said similar things about the toll Bond took on his life before. In fact, after Spectre was released in 2015, Craig infamously said he’d “rather slash my wrists” than play James Bond again. Of course, Craig later apologized for his short temper and went on to play Bond one last time in 2021’s No Time To Die, in which his character bid audiences an uncharacteristically sentimental goodbye. (Then again, at this point, Bond movies are inherently sentimental, right?)
In the new interview, Craig noted that while he was the incumbent Bond, he wouldn't have taken on his current role of William Lee in the movie Queer. “It would look reactionary like I was showing my range,” he explained.
Related: Daniel Craig and the Art of No Bullshit
But Craig’s exhaustion playing Bond is understandable because, historically, it's an unforgiving role. Sean Connery was similarly worried about being typecast, and left the Bond franchise twice, once in 1967, and then again in 1971. If you count his return in 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Connery made a low-key career out of saying goodbye to Bond. While Pierce Brosnan seems to have a cozier relationship with always being compared to the secret agent, the Bond burden is very real.
In his introduction to the newest biography of Bond creator Ian Fleming, author Nicholas Shakespeare admitted he was nervous about “spending four years” writing a book about the tempestuous and “moody, cruel” 007 author. And, according to many, many accounts, the self-imposed pressure of writing a James Bond novel every year is, at least partly, what contributed to Ian Fleming’s early death. Although successful when published, some of Ian Fleming’s friends openly mocked the novels, leading to one instance in which he hid upstairs in his own house while people at a party below, made fun of his books.
On some level, all that emotional baggage is still part of James Bond, for better or worse. So, if Daniel Craig was tuckered out after filming his gritty, very Fleming-esque Bond movies, it only makes sense.
