In a new advert for the top-shelf vodka brand Belvedere, Daniel Craig shimmies into frame like a divorced dad by way of a Tom of Finland subject, wiggling his hips in a chic leather getup that screams rugged flamboyance. You might be reminded, at least a tad, of Tim Curry's sweet transvestite in Rocky Horror. If you're of the more esoteric queer cinema persuasion, perhaps Al Pacino in 1980's Cruising, or the muscle daddies that intertwine with Brad Davis in 1982's Querelle. Maybe it's a bit of everything: whatever the case, Craig carries it off with an unwavering air of goofball cool.
You'll come by few images that assert the transition into a new era of malleable masculinity more than James Bond himself mincing along in a tight black vest with a chunky silver chain like he's on a night out at an East London queer bar, all with a pout — and is that the slightest touch of eyeliner? Later on he moves with overstated clownery, his arms and legs flopping around as if on the end of puppet strings, like your drunkard uncle who turns up to weddings and wakes alike with a tie wrapped around his forehead. More than anything, it's a bit of fun.
“A bit of fun," of course, isn't exactly the descriptor you'd jump to with Bond-era Craig, not least when he'd say stuff like he'd rather “slash his wrists” than return as the superspy after 2015's Spectre. Then there was his Bond, as intense as they came, quite literally so. If Sean Connery was stern with the edges filed off, Craig was unrelentingly severe, not unlike a shot of vodka, no matter how expensive it might be. His era was never humourless, but it was certainly the driest.
There wasn't any room for exploding pens or jetpacks or coats that turn into giant protective hamster balls with the Bourne Bond. The space age gizmo-phobia might've tapered off towards the end of his reign, but until then, everything was gritty and real, credibility the watchword. Craig matched the tone of his movies with his sandpaper-rough skin and demeanor of an aged Rottweiler. The armour dropped sparingly, and only when it could be used to advantage, be it flirting to make up ground with Javier Bardem's Raoul Silva, or laughing through the pain of having one's bollocks lashed by Mads Mikkelsen.
All of this and more serves to show why Craig's post-Bond vibe shift — which started in earnest, really, in the twilight of his 007 years, starring as the idiosyncratic gent-detective Benoit Blanc in 2019's Knives Out — is so interesting, yes, but also perhaps why it has been such a success. Here's the thing with being Bond: once you've done it, it's damn hard to take the label off. Pierce Brosnan has enjoyed a fine enough time on the Hollywood stage since his bow with 2002's Die Another Day, as has Timothy Dalton, popping up in the likes of Hot Fuzz (2007) and, most recently, season five of The Crown. But they're still the guys you point at and think, “Hey, look! It's James Bond!”
That isn't so much the case with Craig, moving into a post-Bond era so far defined by effete playfulness: Blanc is a (canonically gay) daisy of a man with a proclivity for murder mystery parties who, at some point, needs to be a judge on RuPaul's Drag Race. There's more than a little of Blanc in the Belvedere advert, too, in the sense that both the ad's “Daniel Craig” and the Knives Out detective are constructs of showiness.
You'd think that Craig just wants to enjoy a little post-Bond levity, but there's method to the madness: the more fun the 54-year-old has, the more silliness he indulges in, the less we think of him as that stern ‘ol superspy. Clever, huh? Whatever the reasoning, we're here for dad dancing in all of its forms.
