After 14 years, the longest tenure of any Bond, Daniel Craig _is about to hang up his martini glass and Walther PPK. Empire tracks 007 across the globe, from London to Jamaica and New York, to bring you the ultimate intel on No Time To Die. and his emotional farewell...
Three simple syllables. Two simpler words. But their cultural significance is huge. We’ve heard them plenty of times over the years. Sometimes there’s a variation on a theme — “Goodbye, Mr Bond” most often — but the basic gist remains the same. A megalomaniacal villain with designs on taking over the world has lured James Bond, the world’s greatest secret agent, into a trap, and is about to bump him off.
Today, those words are being delivered in Cuba by Christoph Waltz’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld, head of evil organisation SPECTRE and Bond’s adopted brother. Well, not quite. To be completely honest, Empire isn’t in Cuba, but a soundstage at Pinewood Studios that’s pretending to be Cuba, while outside the October wind rages and howls. And we’re not listening to Christoph Waltz, but a member of the production team on No Time To Die, the 25th James Bond movie, repeating lines, for the benefit of the actors, that will later be dubbed by Waltz. With, we fervently hope, a little more feeling than the monotone mumblings currently emanating apologetically from loudspeakers on set.
Anyway, the gist. At some point in No Time To Die, Bond finds himself in Cuba where, along with an associate called Paloma (Ana de Armas), he’s wrangled himself an invite to the hottest party of the year — a gathering of SPECTRE’s unfinest, the bad and the beautiful, the eye-catching and eye-gouging alike. And as he and Paloma wander around, talking to each other on those little Bluetooth earpieces that come in handy in movies like this, a voice can be heard, broadcasting to the throng. Blofeld may be in prison in London, but he’s still making an appearance of sorts. And two things become rapidly apparent: this is a big old birthday bash for the bloviating bellend. And he’s fully aware that Bond has crashed the party. “Enjoy the spectacular end to our pariah,” he tells the commingled. And then, those aforementioned words. “Goodbye, James.”
_“I did most of the movie with a broken leg.”_ - **Daniel Craig**
What is Blofeld up to? Will Bond survive? And what will be left of him? Empire is not at liberty to say. For now, let’s focus on those two very apt little words. Because “goodbye” is right. Welcome to James Bond’s last hurrah. Or, at least, Daniel Craig’s last hurrah.
If you were under the impression that Spectre, the Sam Mendes-directed 2015 flick which ended with Bond retiring from official duty to drive off into the sunset with his new ladyfriend, Léa Seydoux’s Dr Madeleine Swann, was the last time we would see Daniel Craig play Bond, you’re in good company. Daniel Craig was, too. “I think I was ready to go,” he says of finishing that film. “If that had been it, the world would have carried on as normal, and I would have been absolutely fine. But somehow it felt like we needed to finish something off. If I’d left it at Spectre, something at the back of my head would have been going, ‘I wish I’d done one more.’”
Spectre was not an easy shoot. “I did most of the movie with a broken leg,” admits Craig, speaking to Empire in a New York studio in early December. And as it wound down, Craig was simply not in a Bonding mood. “There was a part of me going, ‘I can’t physically do this anymore.’ I felt genuinely that I needed to give up for my own self-preservation as much as anything.” He even told one publication that he would rather slash his own wrists than make another Bond. Yet here he is, wrists emphatically unslashed, fifth Bond movie in the can. It’s partly the result of a relentless campaign from stalwart Bond producers Barbara Broccoliand Michael G. Wilson, keepers of Ian Fleming’s flame, who were determined not to let their man go quietly. “If he hadn’t come back, I was gonna go put a duvet over my head and cry for three years,” laughs Broccoli.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Daniel Craig is not doing No Time To Die out of the goodness of his heart. Yet all the gold in Fort Knox wouldn’t, in and of itself, have been enough to lure him back. Turns out he had something eating away at him too. Though he’s complimentary about Spectre (“I’m very satisfied with it”), which represented a creative and commercial dip from the high of 2012’s Skyfall, perhaps there’s a desire to go out in a blaze of glory. And perhaps there’s, simply, a sense of unfinished business. “I always had a kind of secret idea about the whole lot in my head, about where I wanted to take it,” he says. “And Spectre wasn’t that. But this feels like it is.”
Nobody, least of all Craig, is willing to say this far out what that idea is. But, as the film that would become No Time To Die (a Barbara Broccoli suggestion that, it later emerged, she had perhaps remembered from the days when her dad, Cubby Broccoli, turned a book of the same name into a movie called Tank Force) barrelled along the bumpy road towards the starting line, changing directors from Danny Boyle to Cary Joji Fukunaga, one thing stayed firmly in place: the notion that you can shoot Bond, stab him, or threaten to cut off his nethers with a laser, but if you want to really hurt him, aim for the heartstrings. “We always like to have a very personal trial for him emotionally,” says Broccoli. “We’ve thrown the book at him on this one.”
Over the course of 24 films, via six different incarnations, that span almost 60 years, Bond has been an inveterate womaniser. Legend has it that he has so many notches on his bedpost that his headboard is a gatefold. Yet of all his bedfellows over the years, without doubt the rarest, and most alien to him, has been love. Only two women have pierced the armour surrounding Bond’s heart: Tracy (Diana Rigg) in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, who did so so successfully that they wound up getting married; and Vesper Lynd, Eva Green’s liaison, in Casino Royale, the movie that introduced Craig’s Bond and artfully retconned all the previous Bond films, Tracy and all, out of existence. Spoiler alert, folks: it didn’t work out well for either lady. Either side of that, Bond has been the archetypal love-’em-and-leave-’em guy. There’s been one hard and fast rule: if he’s with a girl at the end of a movie, they won’t be around come the start of the next.
It’s a rule that’s been broken only once, with Eunice Gayson’s Sylvia Trench appearing in both Dr. No and From Russia With Love. So the decision to bring Seydoux back as Swann, the daughter of key SPECTRE Quantum cog Mr White, is interesting. “What else is there in life, other than family and love?” asks Craig. “A lot of the movie is about their relationship, but it’s fucking complicated. It’s not a straight up-and-down love story, I’ll tell you that.”
From the off, No Time To Die will see that relationship tested. “We all have our secrets,” Bond hisses at her mid-car-chase in the film’s trailer. “We just didn’t get to yours yet.” And those secrets will drive the plot. “It was important for me that we get to understand who Madeleine Swann is,” explains Fukunaga. “What’s it like to grow up with a father like Mr White? Who’s her mother? Why is she the right person to be James Bond’s partner?”
_"We get the strongest female characters we can and put those against him.”_ - **Daniel Craig**
The film picks up almost immediately after Spectre, with Bond discombobulated by a revelation about Madeleine’s past. “He believes she’s betrayed him,” says Broccoli. “And he has to deal with that pain of isolation, loneliness and betrayal all over again.” Which, in typical Bond fashion, drives him to seek a quantum of solace in Jamaica. “It’s his spiritual home,” says Wilson of the country where Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, conjured him into life. “He leads a simple life there until the world intrudes.”
Which it does in the shape of Bond’s old CIA buddy Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), who pitches up with a gig that will drag Bond into a dangerous, globe-spanning (Italy! Norway! Cuba!) plot that will see him, along the way, constantly flanked and outfoxed by a group of strong, powerful women: Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny, de Armas’ aforementioned Paloma, Lashana Lynch’s Nomi, an MI6 agent who just might have inherited the 007 mantle; and, in an unexpected rug-pull for the character, Madeleine, the woman he thought he’d left behind. “I think the character has learned a lot over the course of the five films,” says Broccoli. “In this film, he finds out that relationships are hard! Who knew? It was much easier in the old days, when he left them behind.”
Ah, the old days. Not necessarily good ones, either. It’s no coincidence that this is the first Bond film to be produced post-#MeToo and Time’s Up. Nor that Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“She’s a phenomenon,” says Broccoli) was brought on board as one of the film’s writers in order to, as well as bring the funny and, presumably, have Bond glance at the camera every now and again, make sure the women in the film weren’t disposable. “I think Time’s Up had had a profound effect on society, thank God,” says Broccoli. “About time, too.” As one of the most powerful women in film for the past couple of decades, she’s been slowly cementing the franchise’s feminist credentials, and chipping away at Bond’s old-school views. “His attitude towards sex, his attitude towards women, it’s all deeply, deeply flawed,” admits Craig. “I can’t apologise for that. It’s not my job to judge the character. But the way you address it is we get the strongest female characters we can and put those against him.” As this Bond gets wiser with the years, and more in touch with his emotions, he’s less Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, more plain old Mr Bang Bang.
Bang bang, as in explosions. And whizzing bullets. Neither of which will be in short supply in No Time To Die. Hardly surprising when you consider how much Bond has on his plate. There’s his sinister sibling Blofeld, still pulling SPECTRE’s strings despite being banged up. “When you’ve got Christoph Waltz, you don’t want to throw him away, and you don’t want to kill him off too fast,” says Broccoli of the decision to keep Blofeld alive at the end of Spectre. And there’s Rami Malek’s Safin, the mysterious figure from Madeleine’s past who is the film’s chief villain: a man so sinister he makes Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld look like Charles Gray’s Blofeld. “He’s someone who’s lived in the shadows,” explains Fukunaga. “Waiting for the right moment to take the position he thinks is his rightful position: running the underworld.”
At first glance, Fukunaga’s involvement with No Time To Die seems somewhat incongruous. His reputation, across films like Sin Nombre and Beasts Of No Nation and the first season of True Detective, is as an arthouse specialist. The one time he tried to play in the studio swimming pool, with It, he departed the project, citing the same reason that put paid to Danny Boyle’s involvement with this movie: creative differences. “That was kind of an anomaly,” he says. “Every single one of the producers on It, I have follow-up projects with. And here we’re doing probably one of the largest films of the year, and I felt like I had Barbara and Michael’s protection.”
Yet, for Fukunaga, Bond makes perfect sense. A fan of the series since childhood (A View To A Kill was the cherry-popper), he actively lobbied for the gig after Spectre. “It’s a cultural icon, not just in terms of my youth, but what he means to generations before me and after me,” he adds. “I’ve seen every one of Daniel’s films in the cinema, which is not common for me. This is the first time I’ve kind of got re-engaged with it as an adult.”
When Boyle exited, Fukunaga came on board, crafting a completely new story. His goal was to retain a feel of classic Bonds. “It’s helming in the classic sense,” he says. “I’m inheriting a world and shepherding it to its finality in this chapter. There is plenty of room for improvisation, and creative spice, but there’s also a strong sense of responsibility to not upset the apple cart.”
So it is with the action in No Time To Die. There will be all manner of car chases, motorcycle stunts and gunplay, but Fukunaga has been determined not to play catch-up with either the Mission: Impossible franchise, or 50-odd years of Bond’s own action-packed legacy. “Hopefully the action is exciting, but it was more important that it felt threatening,” he says. “Rather than thinking about the action before the story, how could the story drive the action?”
And if that means not flinging Craig out of a plane at 35,000 feet equipped with nothing more than a martini glass, so be it. But there will still be plenty of Bondian bang for your buck. Empire nipped over to Jamaica, as you do, back in April to watch second-unit director Alexander Witt and his team pull off a major aerial stunt that involves a seaplane (piloted by Bond, of course) evading pursuit by armed police and then flying through a series of giant cranes. And on our visit to Pinewood, we’re given a tour of an impressively detailed and vast Cuban street set that will be home to an extended shoot-out and chase sequence. It will also, just a couple of weeks after we get the guided tour, prove to be the place where Daniel Craig shot his last-ever scene as James Bond.
The day: 25 October 2019. The time: godforsaken o’clock. The shot: Bond, running down a corridor. “It was potentially a bit of an anti-climax, because they usually are,” recalls Craig. “Actually, it was very emotional. The whole crew came round and gathered outside. Everybody was hugging each other. I tried to make a speech and couldn’t get it out.”
Unlike the MCU, where an actor can only be sure that they won’t be called back for additional shooting when they’re at the premiere, Bond doesn’t do reshoots. James Bond May Return In Whatever The Hell Bond 26 Will Be Called, but Daniel Craig will not: this is the end of a journey that started almost 15 years ago, when he was unveiled to the world’s press and immediately was subjected to a barrage of abuse. One website, danielcraigisnotbond.com, launched petitions to have his licence to play Bond revoked, and worked themselves up into a frenzy about the very notion of a blond actor playing Bond. “I hope they’re very happy,” he laughs. Happy is exactly what he appears to be. By the time this movie comes out, he will have played Bond for 14 years, longer than any previous actor. And even if five films isn’t quite enough to match the quantity of Connery and Moore’s output, it’s more than he imagined himself making all those years ago. “I was completely ready to just go, ‘That’s the way I see Bond. You don’t like it? Fair enough,” he says. “One of the biggest reasons I did Casino Royale is the line, ‘A vodka martini, please.’ ‘Shaken or stirred?’ My reply was written in the script as, ‘Do I look like I give a fuck?’ And that’s it. That’s the reason I did it. Because what I could not do, and what I refused to do, was repeat what had gone before. What was the fucking point? So I’d rather have just done one and gone, ‘Okay, swing and a miss. There you go. Tried my best.’”
_"The fact is, when you take on this role, you’re Bond for life."_ - **Barbara Broccoli**
That didn’t happen, of course. Casino Royale was a bruising, modern-yet-classic affair that turned doubters into believers. And now Craig is a man so at peace with his choice to walk away from Bond that he’s just ordered a peppermint tea with honey. In front of a journalist. “That’s your opening paragraph,” he laughs. “‘He ordered a peppermint tea with some honey.’ It’s fucking writing itself, this!” Paragraph 24, actually. And it was stirred, not shaken.
We won’t know the details of Bond’s exit for a few months yet. But that won’t stop speculation and scuttlebutt. It seems unlikely that he’ll finish the film back at square one, ensconced once again in MI6. A more solid union with Madeleine — marriage, perhaps? — could also be a contender. Then there’s the D-word of the title. One rumour that dogged Danny Boyle’s departure was his alleged desire to bump off Bond. But thematically it seems like a good place to leave Craig’s character, who was a cold-blooded killing machine when we first met him in Casino Royale. If you track Bond’s career for long enough, then the law of averages says that at some point his luck will run out and he’ll meet a violent end, whether that’s at Blofeld’s birthday bash or at Safin’s hands. And another major franchise earlier this year showed that you can kill off your lead character with grace and emotion, and make their actions matter.
Of course, it’s unlikely that Bond will find time to die in No Time To Die. If it was a sticking point with Boyle, it’s hard to see Broccoli, Wilson and Craig go down that route without him. It would also really piss off Alan Partridge. Most likely, the series simply recasts, as was once tradition, or the reboot is rebooted. “It was there before me and it’s certainly going to be there after me,” says Craig. “It may be that the slate is wiped clean and they begin again. That’s what happened with me. But I’m not worried. It’ll be a new person, and that’ll be exciting.”
Broccoli and Wilson say that they haven’t thought about Bond 26, or who that new person might be, just yet. “We’ll have to see,” says Wilson. “It hasn’t entered our mind.” And why should it? Why focus on tomorrow when a) it never dies and b) today is still right here. Craig hasn’t officially handed in his company lanyard yet. But this time there’s no going back. There will be no persuasion, no last-minute recantations or revocations. “It’s pretty devastating,” admits Broccoli. “He was reluctant to do the role originally, because he knew it was going to change his life. The fact is, when you take on this role, you’re Bond for life. But he’s risen to the occasion. I couldn’t be more proud of him.”
There’s only one way to put it, really. In the immortal words of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and a dozen megalomaniacs before him: goodbye, James.
Originally published in Empire's magazine. No Time To Die comes to UK cinemas from 30 September.