When Daniel Craig was ultimately offered the role of James Bond in the mid-2000s, he approached the opportunity with a healthy degree of skepticism. “I had done weird arty movies,” Craig said in the 2021 Apple TV+ documentary “Being James Bond” (via Radio Times). “… And I didn’t really want to do it, because I thought I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” In fact, Craig had actually made up his mind, revealing, “I was going to get the script, read it, and say, ‘Thanks but no.'” But then he received the script for “Casino Royale” and gave it a read. “The story was solid,” Craig recalled.
“There was a period of trying to woo him,” Bond producer Barbara Broccoli previously told Vanity Fair, noting that the actor’s questions and concerns were addressed in multiple meetings. “… He’s someone who’s very professional, and he throws himself into whatever he’s doing, and he understood it’d be a long commitment.”
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That commitment was all-encompassing, and Craig realized early in the process that a full-on physical transformation would be necessary if he was going to be believable as the “blunt instrument” being reintroduced in “Casino Royale.” “I met a [personal trainer] while smoking a rollie [British slang for a hand-rolled cigarette] and eating a bacon sandwich,” Craig recounted, “but I said to him, ‘I want to change.’ And we did.”
