Daniel Craig Blows His Cover
HERE COMES DANIEL Craig now, slipping into the murky environs of a murky Manhattan hotel, shades on, looking quite sportif in white pants and the thinnest of white V-neck T-shirts, short-sleeved, muscle-filled, easing into the further shadows of the room, taking a seat, taking off the shades, ordering a beer, saying a few words about what he’s been up to since shooting ended on his latest James Bond movie, Skyfall (“Um, drinking heavily. And reconnecting with family and self), saying a few words about the movie itself (“It’s quite good. It’s got a lightness of touch and a wink to it, because, after all, this is a James Bond movie, for fuck’s sake”), and saying a few words about signing up to do two more Bond movies after this one (“I’ve been trying to get out of this from the very moment I got into it, but they won’t let me go, and I’ve agreed to do a couple more, but let’s see how this one does, because business is business and if the shit goes down, I’ve got a contract that somebody will happily wipe their ass with”). He looks at his beer. His beer is gone. He orders another one and then proceeds to tell the filthiest joke ever.
“What’s the most disgusting thing you can think of?” He doesn’t pause. His Liverpudlian accent jumps right to the punch line. “Shoving five oysters up your grandmother’s cunt and sucking out six!”
This leads to considerable open-mouthed laughter on Craig’s part, along with the somewhat disconcerting news that he has indeed told his wife, the British actress Rachel Weisz, whom he married in secret last year, the oyster joke and she liked it. “I think it took her, like, 30 seconds to get it,” he says. “But, I mean, she’s not a shrinking violet, for Christ’s sake.”
Maybe not, but it’s still kind of startling to hear those words come out of Craig’s mouth, if only because he’s not a guy usually given to telling jokes in public, any kind of jokes. Mainly, he’s known for keeping his trap shut and speaking only to complain about the loss of privacy that being Bond has caused him and to say that, nope, no way is he going to blabber about anything personal. And then, there he’ll sit, stonily, his face blank, his expression dour. Indeed, the editors at Esquire were so flummoxed by Craig’s granitic facade that they ended up running an interview with the writer who interviewed Craig instead of the Craig interview itself. He really does have a gift for the buttoned lip.
But today, that Craig is not so much in evidence. He seems loose and agreeable, friendly even, at least at times, and open to talking about his willingness to display full-frontal nudity in films, his past problems with jealousy, the thing he has about his ears, his inability to resist self-Googling, how he once stood lookout in a frozen-duck shoplifting caper, why, in a charity auction, his wife won’t be bidding on his hunky-trim 007 swimsuit, the ways in which he is not like Bond, his trips to a shrink, and the definition of “white-man porn.” Taken as a whole, they seem to say a lot about the kind of guy Craig, 44, is. Oh, and let’s not forget him discussing the age at which he started “finger-banging” girls. That might say something too.
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