Yahoo Lifestyle Daniel Craig says he wouldn't have starred in “Queer” while playing James Bond: 'It would look reactionary'
"It's just not a conversation I wanted," the actor explained. "I had it all the way through Bond anyway."
Daniel Craig isn't too concerned about the audience response to his latest movie, Queer — but he does admit he might have felt differently earlier in his career.
"I couldn't have done this while doing Bond," Craig said of the steamy 1950s-set drama in a new interview with the U.K.'s Sunday Times. "It would look reactionary, like I was showing my range."
The film, which hails from director Luca Guadagnino and his Challengers scribe Justin Kuritzkes, adapts William S. Burroughs' 1985 semi-autobiographical novella of the same name. Craig stars as William Lee, an outcast American expat who becomes infatuated with a younger man, Gene Allerton (Drew Starkey), as they embark across South America in search of ayahuasca.
As William, Craig is drug-addled, melancholic, and flamboyant. It's a far cry from the sly secret agent he embodied for 15 years, which might have appealed to him at the start of his 007 tenure but changed as he found his footing — and big-time fame — playing the role.
"Early on with Bond I thought I had to do other work, but I didn't," he explained. "I was becoming a star, whatever that means, and people wanted me in their films. Incredible." But Craig quickly learned that signing on to other projects in between his Bond films wasn't as satisfying as he'd expected.
"They left me empty," he recalled to the Times. "Then, bottom line, I got paid. I was so exhausted at the end of a Bond it would take me six months to recover emotionally. I always had the attitude that life must come first and, when work came first for a while, it strung me out.”
Related: Inside Queer's trippy and tragic ending: Daniel Craig, Luca Guadagnino decipher the surreal coda
As for if he could have done Queer further on down the line, after cementing his fame with 2012's Skyfall — the massive blockbuster that also marked the 50th anniversary of Bond — Craig remains unconvinced. Nor is he interested in the idea that it would have been a political statement for him to play a gay man while simultaneously leading the Bond franchise.
"It's just not a conversation I wanted. I had it all the way through Bond anyway," he said, pointing to frequent calls at the time for a radically different take on the character. "Could there be this Bond? That Bond? So anything that is going to inflame that conversation? No — life's too short."
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Pushing back on the idea once more, Craig added that his character's sexual identity in Queer is hardly the point. "Sexuality is the least interesting thing to me in this film," he said. "I mean, we all f---. There's a headline. 'We all f---!' Let's be grown-ups."
Craig expressed a similar sentiment while discussing Queer with Entertainment Weekly ahead of its November release. "I feel like the physical act is the least interesting thing," the actor said at the time. "We're all grown-ups. This is what people do. But the only thing that's interesting, and what I think hopefully works about the scenes, is the emotional journey of each character. That's what we wanted to get across. I think that's why they work."
Craig previously addressed how Queer and Bond may have clashed if he'd been working on the projects at the same time, admitting that he would have turned the Guadagnino film down had the offer come in 10 years earlier.
"I wouldn't have done it," he told The New York Times. "I was so wrapped up in Bond and what that was, I would have been terrified of doing something like this."
Now he's far less concerned about how the role will be perceived. "Will the audience respond?" he pondered in the same interview. "You do have to take care of your audience in film, I think, but you can't really be winking at them while you're making it."
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