Daniel Craig has said he would have felt too “self-conscious” to star in his new film Queer while he was still playing James Bond.
The 56-year-old played 007 five times between 2006 and 2021, in the films Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time To Die.
He can next be seen in Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of the William S Burroughs novel Queer, in which he plays an American living in 1950s Mexico who falls in love with a young student.
Appearing on The Graham Norton Show on Friday, Craig said: “I couldn’t have done it during Bond.”
He explained: “Not because I wouldn’t have wanted to, but because I would have felt really self-conscious with people thinking I was trying too hard to be a good actor.”
Regarding what drew him to the film, Craig added: “I’d read William S Burroughs’s Junkie and think I pretended to read Naked Lunch but didn’t know this story. Burroughs’s experience of life always involved a lot of drugs, so the movie sets out to be a bit of a trip. It is all slightly off-kilter with a modern soundtrack and the feel of a movie from the 1940s.
“It blurs the lines around homosexuality which was illegal at the time. You had to have a male front and hide it away with no freedom of expression and I guess I’ve always been fascinated by the artifice of masculinity.”
In a four-star review for The Independent, critic Clarisse Loughrey writes that “Queer draws us into Luca Guadagnino’s world of desire.”
She adds: “‘I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,’ is the line repeatedly echoed across Queer, and largely by Craig’s protagonist [William Lee]. He’s dressed in crisp linen, and makes niceties with the teasing, confrontational air of the actor’s Bond. Yet he carries with him a bitter dissatisfaction that threatens to puff him up like a balloon and, eventually, pop, hastened when he encounters a young American ex-serviceman, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey).
“Starkey, a lead on Netflix’s Outer Banks, plays Allerton like a statue come to life. He’s Lee’s own frustrated Pygmalion, who’s walked right out of his fantasies but remains ultimately unknowable. At times, the film layers images, so that Lee’s ghostly hand will stretch out to try and caress Allerton’s hands and ribs, to possess him in some way.”
