Inside of Daniel Craig, there are two wolves. And you’d better stop asking him about the first of them, since he seems — rightly — bored to death of being asked to speculate on who might don the mantle of 007 and replace him as James Bond.
This—the Bond legacy—is Craig’s first wolf, the role that his defined much of his career since 2006. And Craig’s version of Bond is, deliberately, not like other girls. He’s accused of being a dinosaur and relic of the Cold War in Casino Royale, and the idea of what being Bond means is pushed to its limits as the character faces everything from a twisted mirror of himself in Sylva (Javier Bardem, camp perfection in Skyfall), to falling in love in No Time To Die. This latest iteration of the super-spy, then, challenges the foundations on which he was built; not just the previous versions of the character, but the idea of masculinity itself. What it means, and could go on to become.
It’s this fluid, uncertain relationship to masculinity which Craig brings to his performances as Bond which defines the second wolf that defines his career and more recent persona as an actor: playing weird queer dudes.
In 2006, the same year that Casino Royale was released and Craig exploded to mainstream stardom, he would also appear as Perry Smith, the real-life murderer who formed a relationship with Truman Capote, in Infamous. These two aspects of Craig’s persona have been walking together, hand-in-hand, for almost two decades, possibly coming to a head in his latest — and maybe best — performance, as William Lee in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer.
Culture, unfiltered
Our newsletter will bring you the pulse of queer culture, from the tastemakers to the groundbreakers.
Related
Craig further explained that the power of the story drew him to Queer.
When I stepped out of a screening of Queer, I overheard two things from different audience members that stuck in my mind. The first was the declaration that “Daniel Craig definitely isn’t James Bond anymore” (possibly in reference to the gusto with which Craig approaches the sex scenes in the Guadagnino’s film), and “for the first two thirds, I thought this would be like a version of Carol.”
The latter point is a surprising one to keep up for two thirds of the movie, because it doesn’t take long until Lee’s quest to get in bed with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), begins to smack of booze-drenched desperation. But that desperation is entirely the point. You see, William Lee isn’t like the other queers who have found themselves taking refuge in Mexico City. He laughs at—rather than with—so many of the other men like him, while his friend Joe Guidry (a sneakily brilliant Jason Schwartzman) declares “the rest of them are a bunch of screaming fags.”
Queer is a bitchy film, a kitty with claws, and these scenes are not only funny, but cut to the core of Lee’s relationship to queerness, one that seems to have followed many of Craig’s other performances. Craig’s queer men are often more at war with themselves than the world around them — Mexico City is something of a safe haven for Lee, just as the seedy bars of Soho are for Craig’s George Dyer in Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998) — and one can’t help but wonder if William Lee would ever want to belong to a club that would have someone like him as a member. Craig’s queers find themselves at once emboldened and afraid of what masculinity might mean to them because of their relationships with men. It’s as if, to distance themselves from the worst that can befall queer men, they shrink into masculinity, wearing it like ill-fitting armor.
Related
Before Daniel Craig was James Bond, he played the tormented lover of gay British artist Francis Bacon.
It’s no wonder that so many of the queer men Craig has played belong to another period entirely. To let go of the poisoned chalice of rigid masculinity is to step into the world afraid and vulnerable. When George and Francis Bacon (another gloriously camp, scenery-chewing Derek Jacobi) are getting ready to go to yet another party, George says to Francis, “I don’t like it when you get all… queen-y. It makes me nervous.” Not ashamed, but nervous. This uncertainty, this fear, exists in Queer‘s William Lee as well, no matter the bitchily indifferent pose he strikes. Lee confesses that, on beginning to discovering his own sexuality, he “thought of one of those simpering female impersonators.” Ironic, given that Bobo, a drag performer and old queen seems to have been the first person to instill pride in Lee, telling him that he’s part of everything that’s alive.
It’s no wonder that Lee prefers queer to gay, and this designation seems like it would best fit the type of men that Craig has been playing for decades. Queers, outsiders, prisoners. When Infamous inevitably shows the murder of the Clutter family that brought Perry to jail and Truman Capote from New York to Kansas, we see that the thing that makes Perry finally pull the trigger is the way that his masculinity is challenged, the venom with which his partner in crime calls him a sissy (a word that we see, in flashback, Perry’s father level at him.) It’s as if the only way to assert his masculinity is through an act of violence. Through his many conversations with Capote — who he called “friend Truman” in years of death row correspondence — Perry seems to become more himself when able to talk about anything other than violence, although flashes of it remain. This uncertain queerness, underscored by violence, appears in another one of Craig’s pre-Bond performances as Connor Rooney in Road to Perdition (2002).
Connor is the son of a mob boss, John Rooney (Paul Newman), but he isn’t his father’s favorite. That dubious honor falls on the shoulders of Tom Hanks’ Michael Sullivan. Sullivan is married with children. Connor doesn’t have these things; we’re first introduced to him first alone, lying on a couch, lithe and serpentine, smoking. The only way that Connor feels he’s able to make himself known in his father’s eyes is through misguided acts of violence. Watching him collapse, whimpering with flailing hands and limp wrists in the face of John’s fury, it’s easy to imagine him, like Perry, being called a sissy. There’s a violence to George Dyer in Love is the Devil as well; he seems to exist in two worlds — The Colony, the bars and parties of Bacon’s Soho set, and when the two lovers are alone — less able to be himself around others, when he, his queerness, his masculinity, are all under constant scrutiny. Bacon and his coterie have an affinity for the “gay she/her” pronoun, which constantly strikes George’s ire. When the two have sex, with the long shadows and prowling bodies, the scenes are shot through with the kind of visceral discomfort and violence that defines Bacon’s paintings. This same thing, this brutal gesture towards transcendence — notably, when Craig’s men are free of language, of pronouns, of gay-or-queer — appears in a bizarre, deeply moving sequence in Queer’s final act. Tenderness can’t exist for too long before being called into question, before giving way to more violence.
Craig’s queer characters are often more at war with themselves than the world around them.
Sam Moore
There is, of course, an exception to these men, and that’s the post-Bond role that might become most definitive for how we understand Craig as an actor. And that’s as Benoit Blanc, the charming, ascot-wearing detective from Knives Out, who was casually revealed as gay in the (superior) sequel Glass Onion, his partner played by Hugh Grant. The interesting thing about Blanc in comparison to these other characters is that his queerness is, while not at all surprising, incidental. Blanc’s queerness doesn’t really change the way that we think of the character, although it might confirm or reaffirm some vibes we all picked up in the first movie. But Blanc’s relationship to masculinity is much more at peace than any of these other characters; it isn’t a protective layer or a prison for him. But for George Dyer, Connor Rooney, Perry Smith, and William Lee, it is; as they fight in vain to be free not just from the grip that it forces on them, but to be free of themselves.♦
Sign up for the INTO newsletter and get your twice-weekly dose of stories that shape the queer experience, culture, and lifestyle.
