Daniel Craig says he has no regrets about leaving James Bond behind and has revealed that he discussed killing the character with franchise producer Barbara Broccoli.
“No, none at all,” Craig said when asked by Martha Kearney on BBC Radio 4’s “Best of Today” podcast. “I had an incredibly fortunate 17 years of my life making this. I literally want to spend the next 20 years of my life trying to unhook it all and try and put it into a place because it was incredible. I left it where I wanted it to be. And that I was given the chance to do that with the last movie.”
When Kearney said that Bond had been killed off, Craig said: “He’s not really dead. I’m gone, but it says right at the end [of “No Time to Die”] that Bond will return, so he must return at some point.”
Asked by Kearney about reinventing the character, Craig said, “I don’t know if it sounds disingenuous, I said to Barbara a long time ago, back in 2006, ‘If I do all of these movies, and we get it right, can we kill him off,’ and she said, ‘Yes, you can.’ And I was thinking about myself, about my postponed career and I was trying to think of how that would work and but I was also thinking what they did with ‘Casino Royale’ – they had the chance to reset with that because they went back to the beginning. I thought you’ll have a chance to reset again. That kind seems to be like a good move.”
About the death of Bond, who appears to be blown up on an island at the end of “No Time to Die,” Craig told U.K. publication “The Times”: “Real tragedy is when you have absolutely no choice. We had to find a way to make his death no choice. It was the happiest Bond had ever been because he’d found exactly what he was looking for. Like everyone on Earth, he was just looking for love.”
Craig has moved on to the Knives Out franchise, the second of which, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” streams on Netflix from Dec. 23.