Here comes trouble

THERE has always been something adolescent about 007. Sure, Britain’s best-known secret agent occasionally bears the fate of the free world on his deltoids. What he hasn’t shouldered, as he’s whizzed from one adventure to another over the last 44 years, is the ordinary responsibilities and commitments of a modern adult male. He’s an eternal lad, with a teenager’s contempt for authority and the ring-a-ding-ding Rat Packer’s attitude toward women that real men outgrow about the time they realize Maxim isn’t seriously meant to be a guide to life.

It’s worth noting, then, that Daniel Craig, the latest embodiment of Bond in Columbia Picture’s “Casino Royale,” opening Friday, is a 38-year-old grown-up. And how do we know this actor is a man, not a boy playing movie superstud?

The evidence is in how he digested the brickbats of Bond nerds who flooded cyberspace with objections to his assuming the role. It’s there in how he approaches his job, including the parts of it he’d rather not do. And it’s there in the way he describes himself as “very happily not single,” at a time when imminent international stardom makes him highly desirable to any number of ambitious women. That’s bloody mature.

On a warm October morning in London’s Soho, a grimy district where entertainment companies exist in close proximity to ethnic restaurants and shops that sell sex toys, Craig blows into his publicist’s office as if propelled by a stiff wind. He has pale eyebrows, chiseled cheeks covered with blond stubble and eyes of clear blue, blue enough for him to have convincingly played Paul Newman’s son in “Road to Perdition.” Something about his energy suggests that he arrived on a motorcycle. (He didn’t.) Maybe it’s the cool, masculine, Steve McQueen aura that surrounds him.

Before production began on “Casino Royale,” Craig put on 20 pounds of muscle, and he’s still pumped up. He’s dressed in jeans and a black polo shirt with a white wife-beater peeking out at the hip. The big Omega Seamaster Professional 300M watch he wears in the movie covers one wrist.

This is who Esquire magazine chose as the best dressed man in the world this year? He grunts, then says, “I’m not going to get into that. This time of the day, on a Monday morning, this is the best I can do.”

Ah, the indignities of publicity. “I dislike that I have to get involved in it because it’s selling, and I didn’t get into this business to be a salesman,” he says. “I’m an actor. But now that I’m involved more, I realize that if you don’t sell the movie, no one’s going to see it. I can see the benefit. I’m not stupid. I get it.”

Esquire fashion editor Nick Sullivan says the best-dressed award was less about Craig’s style acumen than Bond’s, testament to the fact that the two men, the real and the fictional, tend to be confused in the public mind. The merging of performer and character ignores the fundamental ability of an actor to transform himself into a closeted gay Mormon; a not-too-bright, sexually carnivorous carpenter; a bloodthirsty Israeli Mossad agent; a dangerously virile poet; and a needy murderer, all of which Craig has done, in “Angels in America” at the National Theater in London and on-screen in “The Mother,” “Munich,” “Sylvia” and “Infamous.”

Craig began acting in his teens in Liverpool and worked his way up through small theater productions, television shows, better stage roles and more than two dozen films. He knows he now stands poised to become a worldwide movie star, and it would be against his nature to sleepwalk through the opportunity. So he starts the interview from an intelligently wary place, quickly warms up to funny, can’t quite help being charming and ultimately carries the encounter all the way to thoughtful. Maybe his comments aren’t really all that profound, but he has an incredible voice, a resonant basso profundo that’s sometimes emphatic, other times a silken growl. Whether he likes it or not, that voice could sell burgers to vegetarians.

When the selection of the star of the 21st film in the Bond series was announced, a hail of criticism was unleashed in forums on such websites as CommanderBond.net and Absolutely James Bond (ajb007.co.uk). The highly emotional objections covered everything from his blond hair to his working-class background. He just didn’t fulfill everyone’s Bond fantasies. Craig would have had to hole up in a heavily fortified storm cellar to avoid the tempest.

“At first, I had a horrible kind of sadomasochistic fascination, and the feeling that I had to read it all,” Craig says. “A lot of it was name-calling. Playground stuff. But it’s hard not to take it in, on some level.”

With enough leading man roles under his belt, he’d have to know that he’s easy on the eyes, a circumstance that’s all the more compelling for his lack of Pierce Brosnan-like prettiness. His face often appears creased, even rumpled, yet sooner or later, and it’s usually sooner, women and even straight men describe him as sexy. “He has a much darker, more vulnerable quality than Bond has shown before, a toughness and a sexiness,” says “Casino Royale” director Martin Campbell. “Whenever Daniel was on screen in ‘Munich,’ he was the one your eyes went to.”

Nevertheless, the anti-Craig posts were brutal enough to demolish the healthiest ego. When a bully starts picking on you for having big ears, it can dredge up long buried childhood insecurities.

When the early round of bile hit the fan, Craig was on location in the Bahamas, working long hours. His three stunt doubles -- specialists in driving, fighting and acrobatics -- took their share of punishment, but he performed much of his own derring-do. “I’d be just bruised, battered, cut and bleeding, all the time,” he says. “I’d get out of bed very slowly in the morning. Getting hurt wasn’t fun, but pushing myself, physically and mentally, hanging off the back of a truck, running across a 4-inch beam, 150 feet up in the air as quickly as I possibly could without looking down or falling, that was great. There’s this feeling of finishing the shot and breathing a sigh and feeling so alive.”

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Going for it

THE demands of the six-month shooting schedule would serve as a positive distraction from the Internet vitriol, which the British tabloids enthusiastically spread. Craig says he suffered through a few very dark days and ultimately decided his revenge would be proving his critics wrong. “Beforehand, I wanted to make a great movie,” he says, “and when all that started happening, it was like, we’ve got no choice now.”

Trouncing the doubters with excellence -- what a reasoned reaction. Ever been in therapy? “Not enough,” he says, laughing. “Nowhere near enough.”

Craig’s capacity to feel wounded when body-slammed, a quality he’s shown often on camera, worked in his favor. Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson wanted “Casino Royale” to be different from its predecessors in a number of ways. Product placements survived, but the filmmakers all but eliminated CGI effects and Bond’s toy chest -- no fountain pens that turn into Uzis this time around.

Although Bond epitomized suave British masculinity on film, in Ian Fleming’s books, 007 has been known to throw up from anxiety. Since the “Casino Royale” story begins back when Bond became Bond, it offered the opportunity to rewrite the canon. The hunt was on for a more emotional, edgier guy.

Craig jumped to the top of Broccoli’s list after she saw him in “Layer Cake,” a nasty little British gangster movie he dominates as a pragmatic killer whose brash exterior is designed to protect a nervous core. And then there’s the moment when he first spots temptress Sienna Miller on a crowded dance floor. With a cinematic cliche waiting to happen, Craig is so thoroughly, instantly lust and love-struck that you’d think he invented romantic longing.

Will he bring depth to James? Does Queen Elizabeth love her Welsh corgis?

Just because the producers considered Craig their front-runner didn’t mean he was ready to be fitted for his tuxedo. “He said to us, ‘If I take this part, I will do it wholeheartedly. But I can’t say I will till I’ve read the script,’ ” Wilson says. “So we had to pursue other possibilities.” Five actors, including Craig, were screen-tested, two little-known Australians, another Brit, and Goran Visnjic, from “ER.”

Before Craig would accept the role, he made it clear that he wasn’t prepared to be a puppet Bond. He remembers thinking, “If I don’t feel that I’ll actually have my say, then my first response is ‘No. Not in a million years.’ On a movie, I just feel if I’m included, I might be able to help out. I ask the director, ‘What’s the big picture? Tell me what’s going on ... then maybe I can make it better.’ ”

He had some fear of being typecast as 007 and discussed the decision with his family, including his 14-year-old daughter from a two-year marriage to a Scottish actress, with close friends and his American girlfriend, Satsuki Mitchell, a production executive. He asked directors he’d worked with if they’d employ him again, post-Bond.

“They all said yes, so I’m holding them to it,” he says.”

“Daniel can do Shakespeare next week and a western the week after,” director Campbell says. “He’s someone I know will do art house movies and blockbusters.”

When he was satisfied with the script, he signed on for three movies. “You’ve got no choice,” he says. “You don’t walk away from this. I’ve been a Bond fan all my life. You feel kind of proud to pretend to be this remarkably wonderful human being that we’re all supposed to love, and you feel a responsibility for taking what’s gone before to somewhere else, to somewhere new and exciting. This is one of those things where I’ll go down in flames or something great will come out of it. I think something great will come out of it. It already has.”

Those in Craig’s corner agree. “Daniel’s always been very determined and focused,” Wilson says. “He’s had his ups and downs, and he’s been acknowledged as a great actor. When success comes to people too early, it can affect their personalities. I’ve seen it happen. Somebody his age who has worked his way up has a better perspective on fame and fortune. I don’t think he’s the kind of guy who’ll get drunk and beat up guys in bars and drive off a cliff. Daniel will keep his head.”

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mimi.avins@latimes.com