The movie that led Daniel Craig to become James Bond
There isn’t a casting process in the industry that generates anywhere near as much hoopla as James Bond. The conversation surrounding the next iteration of 007 begins long before the current incumbent has even vacated the role.
The questions over who will get the job to be Daniel Craig’s successor have been raging in the background for years already. It’s a cyclical debate that begins anew anytime the actor tasked with playing cinema’s most famous secret agent begins to wind down their tenure.
With Pierce Brosnan fulfilling his four-film contract following Die Another Day, it was soon revealed that the next stage in the franchise’s evolution would focus on a younger Bond at the beginning of his career. That instantly eliminated great swathes of the hypothetical contenders, but there was no shortage of long-time fans who were less than thrilled at who they ended up getting.
Of course, any criticisms of hiring Craig were rendered obsolete by the time the stark black-and-white prologue of Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale had even ended. It made a mockery of anyone who was left clutching their pearls at the prospect of a blonde star who was under six feet donning the iconic tuxedo.
Hugh Jackman famously knocked back the chance to be Bond and Wolverine at the same time, while a myriad of other cross-continental candidates were either in the mix or suiting up for the audition process, a lengthy list that included Karl Urban, Matthew Rhys, Sam Heughan, Sam Worthington, Rupert Friend, Antony Starr, Dougray Scott, and Henry Cavill. As it turned out, Craig was the perfect fit, but the circumstances that got him there were rather unfortunate for one filmmaker in particular.
Although he’d been acting since the early 1990s, it wasn’t until Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake that Craig showcased undeniable movie star potential. Fittingly, Vaughn was drafted in to meet with Eon Productions over potentially sitting in the Casino Royale director’s chair. Still, despite missing out on the job, it was he who suggested the next leading man.
“Ironically, we talked about who I’d cast, and I said, ‘What about Daniel?’” he shared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And they’re like, ‘We’re not sure about Daniel.’” Even before that, on the Layer Cake DVD commentary, Vaughn hinted that Craig “wants to be James Bond”, with a combination of that film and an ill-fated conversation setting things up perfectly for the star to be deemed the outstanding candidate.
In a May 2005 interview – five months before his casting was announced – Craig sat alongside Vaughn in an interview with IGN and lamented on missing out. “I think I would have probably been a bit too radical for it,” he said after admitting he’d “just let it go” after an early phone call went nowhere. They were promoting Layer Cake at the time, but little did he know that he was only a short while away from being trotted out in front of the world as the brand-new Bond.