Daniel Craig On Playing James Bond: ‘I Thought It Was Never Going To Happen’

Daniel Craig’s last outing as the famous superspy James Bond is drawing near, but even to this day, the actor still couldn’t believe that he would get to play the iconic role for the big screen.

In his recent conversation with Edith Bowman for his BAFTA: Life in Pictures event, the 53-year-old Hollywood star reflected on his time playing Agent 007 for the past 16 years. He admitted that he almost turned down the role because he just couldn’t believe that something so big was offered to him.

“I just said I can’t, I mean; I think you got the wrong guy. People used to say, ‘Oh you must have always wanted to be James Bond.’ I went well, yeah, as a kid I kind of thought about it. I wanted to be Spiderman as well, but I just thought it was never going to happen,” Craig was quoted as saying by Variety in a report published Saturday.

In the same interview, he acknowledged how his 2004 crime drama “Layer Cake” might have helped him land the role since the film seemingly changed the media’s perception of him from that moment on.

“They always want to talk about ‘oh, you know ‘Layer Cake,’ it must have been your audition,’ and I was like, ‘believe me, it was the last thing on my mind that I was ever gonna play James Bond at that point,’” he said, before noting that indeed “people saw me in a different way and ‘oh, you could be a leading man.’ That definitely had an incredibly positive effect on my career.”

Craig’s final film as Bond, “No Time To Die,” is finally hitting cinemas on Oct. 8, following successive delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was filmed in 2019, about four years after “Spectre” was released in 2015. According to the actor, he really thought that “Spectre” would be the last time he would get to portray the iconic spy.

“I thought that was it. And I’m really, really happy that I was given the opportunity to come back and do ['No Time to Die'] because we’ve sort of wrapped up a lot of the stories. And just a chance to come do one more was wonderful,” he said during a recent guest appearance on “The Graham Norton Show.”

Meanwhile, speaking of the theatrical release of the film, Craig said he’s happy that the producers opted to bring his fifth and final film as James Bond to cinemas instead of putting it online only amid the pandemic.

“It would have been sad [to see it on a streaming service], and we got here and we’re going to actually get into the cinemas,” he was quoted as saying by Deadline.