Where were they then?: Daniel Craig in the ’90s
In derided, overlooked, and celebrated projects alike, there were hints of his ability to bring more emotional dimension to James Bond.
Implicitly itching for a public-relations boost, the 1999 film Love & Rage pinned its poster with retroactive hooks no earlier than 2006. Billing four notable names in its cast, the placard highlighted Daniel Craig as “James Bond 007.”
That marketing maneuver did not do much to spruce up the project’s tepid reception. But the effort befits a pattern evident in think pieces following the recent release of Craig’s final go-round as Bond, No Time to Die.
From Casino Royale to now, Craig has been synonymous with improvement. Consider the headline above Justin Charity’s write-up in The Ringer last Monday: “Daniel Craig Salvaged a Character Not Built for the 21st Century.”
He started doing that a handful of years after building his A-list credentials during the dusk of the 20th century. The same motif of redemption and attaining consistently favorable attention applies to his blossoming as an actor in the ’90s.
Beginning with his last semesters at the historic Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he overlapped with Joseph Fiennes, Damian Lewis, and Ewan McGregor, Craig logged 25 mainstream TV or movie credits before the decade was up.
The characters bookending that baker’s dozen plus a dozen almost reflect the evolution he punctuated on Ian Fleming’s brainchild. In seven years, he went from playing a detestable Afrikaner to a sympathetic sergeant, just as prior cinema Bonds warrant uncomfortable revisits while his is a poster child for progress.
Last Thursday, Carolyn Wells of Longreads penned an assessment of all of the character’s iterations under this subtitle: “How has someone who is a borderline rapist, murderer, and potential sociopath, endured through all these decades?”
Wells and others establish a distance between Craig’s embodiment and those toe-curling nouns. Contrasting him even with his immediate predecessor, Pierce Brosnan, Wells writes that Craig represented a “reinvention” that addressed “some of the more unpalatable elements of Bond.”
In terms of character likeability and collective production reviews, Craig’s first impression as a film actor exposed room for refinement. In 1992’s The Power of One — freshly adapted from Bryce Courtenay’s 1989 novel and released roughly nine months after apartheid was formally abolished in South Africa — he was chief antagonist Sergeant Botha. His character is self-explanatorily deplorable, and costar Morgan Freeman later told IGN he was underwhelmed by the project in general.
That said, the violent scenes proved to be a glimpse of Craig’s future as action royalty. He got sprinkle after sprinkle of seasoning on that front as he made his initial forays into television. Of particular note, he twice portrayed Lieutenant Hidalgo on Zorro and played Gilbert Stokesay for the whole three-part series Anglo Saxon Attitudes.
If nothing else, in what remains his least regarded movie, Craig shared a heartstring-tugging scene exclusively with an equally pre-fame Kate Winslet.
The next year, he guest starred as Schiller in a second-season episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, along with Catherine Zeta-Jones in her lone appearance on the short-lived show as Maya.
In all, Craig made seven one-off appearances on various U.K. programs over his first two calendar years of professional acting. His second film role (Lieutenant Guth in Genghis Cohn) capped his 1993, and he did not show up anywhere again until he played Master Kane, the protagonist’s mentor in 1995’s A Kid in King Arthur’s Court.
Rotten Tomatoes ranks this project as Craig’s least regarded, based on a paltry 5% Tomatometer score. To reaffirm that point, this past Sunday, the site published an editorial with an incomplete ranking of his movies. A Kid in King Arthur’s Court ranks 30th out of 30, while The Power of One is No. 22 at 39% critical approval. The list does not rate any of Craig’s other ’90s movies, although the site itself does.
But if nothing else, as Master Kane, he did share a heartstring-tugging scene exclusively with fellow Anglo Saxon Attitudes alum Kate Winslet.
Back on the small screen the next year, Craig was a regular on two short-order series, playing Geordie in Our Friends in the North and Jemmy in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, with soon-to-be ER fixture Alex Kingston in the latter title role.
In between, he garnered his first close-up on a movie poster as Matt Kearney in the TV movie crime drama Kiss and Tell. He got the same treatment the next year when his likeness shifted back to the cinema as John McHale in Obsession.
Ahead of Kiss and Tell’s June 15, 1997, screening on the A&E network, Variety’s Tony Scott pronounced the film “top-form British mystery making.” In quick-hit assessments of the core characters, he offered, “Craig’s tortured Matt enriches the vidpic.”
Obsession was less celebrated, and has been particularly so with the passage of time. In April 2020, while No Time to Die was on indefinite hold, Screen Rant rounded up the five highest and lowest IMDB scores in Craig’s filmography. The movie in question was dubiously honored as the best of the worst.
Near the century’s end, and a lifetime after the 1916-set movie’s events, Craig all but represented history’s outlook on the Great War in contrast with his onscreen charges’ uninformed eagerness for action denoting the attitudes of the time.
Dan Peeke, the listicle’s author, noted that Craig “was fresh-faced and relatively inexperienced” at the time. Of Obsession as a whole, he opined “It’s a pretty bland tale of a love triangle, but it was strangely well-received upon release. It has been retrospectively panned by critics and IMDb alike.”
Peeke’s assessment of Love and Rage, which came out the next year and ranked third-worst on the IMDB leaderboard: “It is another romantic drama, with Craig involved in a love triangle.
“His acting is, as ever, absolutely fine, but the film loses itself in its own sense of melodramatic over-the-top-ness.”
Over the top, in its original and wholly grim connotation, comes to mind with Craig’s last major project of the ’90s. After playing a small part in the Cate Blanchett vehicle, Elizabeth, and portraying George Dyer, the onscreen secret lover of title player Derek Jacobi in Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, he grew up fast to star as Sergeant Telford Winter in the World War I movie The Trench.
Critical momentum was on the newly thirtysomething Craig’s side at that point. Love Is the Devil upholds 70% approval by RT’s roundup of paid pundits and 61% from paying customers.
While reviewing The Trench, David Rooney wrote for Variety, “Craig, following his impressive work in ‘Love Is the Devil,’ brings complexity and hints of sadness to his character, a tough, rigorous and honorable man.”
The Trench hit its homeland’s theaters on September 17, 1999, then came stateside over a year later. In November 2000, the New York Times’ Stephen Holden underscored the historical fiction’s powerful, poignant, down-to-earth nature.
Near the century’s end, and a lifetime after the 1916-set movie’s events, Craig all but represented history’s outlook on the Great War in contrast with his onscreen charges’ uninformed eagerness for action denoting the attitudes of the time.
In his review, Holden wrote, “Daniel Craig is Telford Winter, the tough, realistic older sergeant with a family back home who consoles himself by eating spoonfuls of his wife’s homemade strawberry jam. In a Hollywood movie, he might be played by George Clooney or Ed Harris.”
Is it a stretch to parallel that with Charity’s note that, “In Craig’s fifth and final entry, No Time to Die, Bond strikes rare notes of emotional clarity and personal fulfillment”? Or that “Bond is still grieving his lover Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) after she died in his arms in Casino Royale”?
Or how about Wells’ impressed observation that “this Bond actually falls in love, actually cries”?