'Craig will wow 007 critics'
Staff Reporter
Tue, 04 Jul 2006
Daniel Craig, still stinging from criticism of his selection as the new James Bond, will win over those who doubt his suitability for the role of 007.
So believes Caterina Munro, who plays the superspy’s lover in the upcoming ‘Casino Royale’.
“He’s a great actor,” his Italian co-star explained.
“Casino Royale is the first book Ian Fleming wrote and it means we see how James Bond became James Bond,” she elaborated.
“Daniel is giving to this James Bond something else we never saw before.
“When he’s going to kill someone, he looks like a real killer, when he kisses me, when he makes love, he’s so sexy.
“You never saw a James Bond like this,” she added.
As a result the new film, due for international release on November 17, is also less playful and more violent than its predecessors.
“This James Bond doesn’t look like a little cartoon like before, like the last one or so charming and playful like the first James Bond,” she said. “This is new.”
The 38-year-old Craig, who played a South African hitman in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Munich’ and starred in gangster flick ‘Layer Cake’, is the sixth actor to play Bond.
Following in the footsteps of Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, Craig has promised a more “human and fallible” Bond.
The 21st Bond film, directed by Martin Campbell who resurrected the series with 1995’s ‘GoldenEye’, has long been billed as edgier than its predecessors, and journalists got a taste of that grittiness during a twenty-minute preview this week.
The footage, shown at the Amsterdam Cinema Expo reportedly left journalists impressed with Craig’s rough around the edges portrayal of Bond, as well as the film’s darker tone.
“The footage showed off Craig as a grittier Bond, with scenes of more intense, visceral hand-to-hand combat than 007 has tackled in recent pics,” wrote Variety.
“One black-and-white scene flashed back to Bond's first ever [brutal and hard-to-pull-off] kill as an agent, as well as his [much more sleek and signature] second assassination.”
The film focuses on Bond’s first mission.
On a lighter note, ‘Casino Royale’ features Virgin Atlantic supreme Sir Richard Branson and his son Sam in cameo performances.
The entrepreneur, who was recently in South Africa to launch Virgin Mobile and a Virgin credit card, will appear as himself during a sequence at Miami airport where Bond checks in. The scene was, however, shot in Prague last May.
“James Bond is original, cool and sophisticated — just like an airline I know,” Branson said during his airline’s inaugural flight to Jamaica’s Montego Bay this week.
“Virgin Atlantic is delighted to be a global partner of the new James Bond movie, ‘Casino Royale’, and I’m just a little excited to be playing a cameo in the film,” he added.
“Having met Daniel Craig and the rest of the team on set, I have no doubt that ‘Casino Royale’ will be one of the most successful James Bond films ever.”
The 55-year-old businessman appears as briefly a shuttle pilot in the new ‘Superman Returns’ and featured as a hot air balloonist in Jackie Chan’s ‘Around The World In Eighty Days’ remake.
Joining Branson, but in far more substantial roles, are ‘Kingdom Of Heaven’ star Eva Green and Judi Dench, who returns as M.