Daniel Craig confirmed as 007
by Annika Pham
As announced in Cineuropa last April 7, Daniel Craig has been confirmed as the new actor who will play the coveted part of James Bond in the 21st film of the series Casino Royal set to start shooting next January.
37 year-old Craig who arrived by a Royal Marine speedboat at a press conference held at the HMS President boat on the Thames in London last Friday said the role would be "a huge challenge. Life is about challenges and this is one of the big ones as an actor. Bond is a huge iconic figure in movie history and these things don’t come along very often", he said.
Craig was revealed to the film world with the 1998 biopic of painter Francis Bacon Love is The Devil directed by John Maybury which screened the same year in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard. The UK actor then appeared in films such as Roger Michell’s The Mother, Sam Mendes Road To Perdition and Lajos Kotai’s Fateless [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. And he has just finished Steven Spielberg’s new drama Munich about the Olympic massacre of 1972.
Chosen among 200 international actors for the part of the world famous spy, Craig will be the first blond Bond.
Based on Ian Fleming’s first Bond of the series, Casino Royal will be about 007’s first mission. According to filmmaker Martin Campbell who filmed Bond’s 1995 Goldeneye with Pierce Brosnan, "the new film will be tougher and grittier and the relationship Bond has with the girl Vesper Lynch (still to be cast) is a lot more serious than we’ve seen in the past. I think the film will definitely be darker. More character, less gadgets", he stressed.
The $100m film will be shot partly in Prague, in the UK at Pinewood Studios and in the Bahamas and the worldwide release date through Sony Pictures is already set for November 2006.
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