MGM
Bad news, fellas: if Daniel Craig isn’t handsome, then I’m not sure what hope the rest of us have.
According to Casino Royale director Martin Campbell — who also helmed Pierce Brosnan’s maiden voyage as 007, 1996’s Goldeneye — he wasn’t convinced that Daniel Craig was handsome enough to play the iconic MI6 spy James Bond.
“My only reticence with Daniel…he was really a superb actor, there’s no doubt about that. It was the fact that with people like Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan was that they were all traditional-looking Bonds. All handsome guys, all sexy, all very attractive to women and so forth,” Campbell said in a recent interview with Express UK.
“Daniel was obviously tougher and rugged, but he wasn’t a traditional handsome guy. So I just thought about that for a minute and apart from that, absolutely it was always him.”
Craig obviously wound up being a massively successful choice to play James Bond, as he’d go on to play the character in five films across 15 years: Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2011), Spectre (2015), and No Time To Die (2021).
Playing James Bond would make Craig one of the biggest actors in the world, as he’s since taken on a lead role in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise, which will reportedly net him $100 million in salary for the two subsequent sequels produced by Netflix.
With Craig officially retiring from the role in 2021 following the release of No Time To Die, the producers of the iconic franchise — one of the longest-running in Hollywood — are tasked with finding someone to fill the shoes previously worn by Craig, Brosnan, Timothy Dalton, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, David Viven, and Sean Connery.
Earlier this year, reports indicated that the Bond producers were in the midst of their search for the series’ next star, although it’s unclear how the ongoing actors’ strike has affected that.
Currently, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is the betting favorite to succeed Craig as James Bond. The likes of Henry Cavill and Richard Madden have also been frequently mentioned as potential options.