Italian
Daniel Craig said in a recent interview with the U.K.’s Sunday Times that he couldn’t have played his character in Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” while working on James Bond movies.
In the film “Queer,” based on the 1985 semi-autobiographical novella of the same name by William S. Burroughs, Craig plays William Lee, an American expat who becomes infatuated with a discharged U.S. Navy serviceman named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey).
“I couldn’t have done this while doing Bond,” Craig told the Sunday Times. “It would look reactionary, like I was showing my range.”
Popular on Variety He continued, “Early on with Bond I thought I had to do other work, but I didn’t. I was becoming a star, whatever that means, and people wanted me in their films. Incredible. Most actors are out of work for large chunks so you take your job offers — but they left me empty. 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.”
Craig played the titular British Secret Service agent in five Bond movies from 2006 to 2021. He first starred in “Casino Royale” and ended his tenure with “No Time to Die.”
Elsewhere in his interview with the Sunday Times, Craig dismissed the idea that portraying a gay man while still leading the Bond franchise would have made a statement on masculinity.
“It’s just not a conversation I wanted. I had it all the way through Bond anyway,” he explained. “Could there be this Bond? That Bond? So anything that is going to inflame that conversation? No — life’s too short.”
