Bond's revenge

Of course, the suit in Casino Royale that everyone talked about was a blue swimsuit that revealed Craig to be the most buff Bond ever to strip off his shirt. And he’s sick of hearing about it. “I’m always going to shy away from a conversation about me walking out of the sea with a pair of trunks on,” he says, “but mainly because it was a total accident. It was meant to be a swimming shot; the water was so shallow I had to stand up.” Whether by design or accident, it looked like an homage to Ursula Andress, the first Bond girl, stepping from the sea in a white bikini as Honey Ryder in Dr. No (1962). Now Bond-sploitation had come full circle: in Casino Royale, the hottest sex object was not another Bond girl, but Bond himself.

Craig has a thespian rational for striking a beefcake pose. “I wanted him to look like he’d just stepped out of the armed forces. That’s why I bulked up. If I’m going to play him running around, jumping, throwing himself off buildings and through windows, if he takes his shirt off, he has to look like he can do it.” He did not get as pumped for Quantum of Solace, he adds. “This movie’s a little different, although I’m actually fitter than I was in the last one, because I wanted to do more. I don’t strip down to my underpants . . . but there’s a little bit o
f flesh.”

Craig is the most athletic Bond we’ve seen, but the bar has been raised since Connery idled through his later films with a marshmallow belly and a rug of chest hair. “You read Fleming,” says Craig, “and it’s like Bond gets up in the morning, has six scrambled eggs made with cream, eight rashers of bacon, four cups of espresso, does 20 press-ups and smokes 20 cigarettes, then has a shot of something. Attitudes have changed. We probably do live in a world of body-fascism now.”

And the enemies have changed. In Quantum of Solace, back to avenge the death of the babe who died in Casino Royale, our former Cold Warrior is now battling conspiracies of high finance—he’s pitted against another sinister businessman (Mathieu Amalric)—which is only fitting in a world on the brink of economic catastrophe. As our wealth evaporates, perhaps Bond offers the ultimate bailout, a fantasy of bottomless opulence. “You update these things at your peril,” says Craig, adding that the new movie derives its style directly from Fleming and is rife with homages to early Bond movies.

Although Quantum of Solace is an original script, its title comes from a Fleming short story that’s unlike anything else he wrote—more in the vein of Somerset Maugham. Trapped on a chintz sofa with the Bahamian governor, Bond says, “If I ever married, I would marry an air hostess,” which prompts the governor to tell the story of a stewardess who found a devoted husband then pushed his trust to the limit with her infidelities—a “quantum of solace” being the modicum of comfort required to sustain a relationship.

Bond “was never comfortable sitting deep in soft cushions,” writes Fleming. “He felt foolish sitting with an elderly bachelor on his bed of rose chintz . . . There was something clubbable, intimate, even rather feminine about the scene and none of these atmospheres was appropriate.” But after that allergic flush of homophobia, by the end Bond is humbled, realizing that “the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow” next to the “real violence” of everyday life.

As I push Craig to psychoanalyze Bond on our own chintz couch of forced intimacy, he seems uneasy. “I feel I’m writing a thesis here,” he finally says, exasperated. “Bond goes after the bad guys and always did. I don’t think there’s anything deeper than that.” Although Craig has reinvented Bond by diving into the psychological depths of Fleming’s alter ego, he’s not about to let the character get under his own skin. “When I’m filming,” he says, “it envelops me. But as soon as I finish, I’m outta there.” Just like Bond.