Daniel Craig describes James Bond’s ‘construct of masculinity’ as ‘laughable’ and ‘artificial’
Daniel Craig played James Bond for 15 years. (MGM)
Queer star Daniel Craig has opened up about his concerns regarding James Bond and the often toxic, hegemonic masculinity associated with the famous character.
In a recent interview promoting Luca Guadagnino’s new LGBTQ+ film, Craig has reflected on his time portraying MI6 secret agent 007 across 15 years.
“I would say one of my biggest reservations about playing [Bond] would be the construct of masculinity,” he told The New Yorker.
“It was often very laughable, but you can’t mock it and expect it to work. You have to buy into it.”
Craig played the role of Bond in five movies, starting with 2006’s Casino Royale and concluding with 2021’s No Time to Die where Craig bid farewell to his version of James Bond.
The 56-year-old English actor went on to note that he was interested the “artificial” concepts of masculinity that connect Bond to his character of Lee in Queer.
Based on William S. Burroughs’ novel, Lee is a troubled alcoholic and drug addict who wanders around Mexico City and becomes obsessed with recently discharged US Navy serviceman Allerton (Drew Starkey).
Craig shared: “The vulnerability of human beings is always interesting to me. We’re all vulnerable. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter how tough you are, everybody’s vulnerable.
“But it’s how boys are brought up, how men are expected to behave, how someone like Burroughs was expected to behave.”
So, just how toxic is Bond’s masculinity?
Hegemonic masculinity is defined as a practice that allows men to hold dominant positions in society that justifies the subordination of others – that being women, other gender identities and other marginalised ways of masculinity.
There are many examples of this in our culture, one being James Bond – particularly the book version who first surfaced in 1953 spy novel Casino Royale, written by former naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming.
There are many cases of Bond’s poor treatment of women in the novels, he’s notably a womaniser who seduces women for his own gain only to later abandon them. They’re also jam-packed with misogyny.
In Goldfinger, for example, Bond says that votes for women have led to “a herd of unhappy sexual misfits.”
In Casino Royale, Fleming writes: “This was just what he had been afraid of. These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men.”
In the same book, Bond also describes women as being only “for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around.”
“I couldn’t have done this movie when I was doing Bond.”
Craig and Guadagnino have previously spoken on the multifaceted nature of the character of Bond when a journalist asked the pair if there could be a gay James Bond.
“Guys, let’s be adults in the room for a second,” Guadagnino answered.
“There is no way around the fact that nobody would ever know what James Bond desires, period,” Guadagnino continued (via The Hollywood Reporter). “The important thing is that he does his missions properly.”
This more recent interview sees Craig reflect on how vulnerability was constructed in the Bond franchise compared to Queer: “Listen, [Bond] is nearly 20 years of my life. When I took it on I was one person. I’m now a completely different person. I’m not doing this movie in response to that. I’m not that small.
“But I couldn’t have done this movie when I was doing Bond. It would’ve felt kind of, ‘Why? What are you trying to prove?’”
Daniel Craig previously told PinkNews that it was a “beautiful challenge” to play a character like Lee, though admitted he will “never really know” what he must’ve been experiencing, as a gay man in 1950s Mexico.
“To meet a character as complicated as this was just such a beautiful challenge,” he explained of how he feels playing the role in retrospect.
“And just to do it in this context with Luca, where we did it, how we did [it], all of those things, was just… this is a cliche, ‘[those parts] don’t come along very often’, but they just don’t.”
Since Bond, Craig went on to star as the gay detective Benoit Blanc (married to Hugh Grant) in the Knives Out films (the third instalment coming soon).
Queer is out in US cinemas now and UK cinemas on 13 December.
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