London, England–James Bond is making it easier for Daniel Craig to build a career. Of course, it doesn't always work that way. More often than not, actors who choose to take on iconic roles are stereotyped while they are playing the part and are often still trying to escape the character's long shadows years after they've walked away. In a London hotel's interview room, where he has come to promote The Golden Compass, Craig, who is about to start work on a second film in the Bond series, says that taking on the role of 007 has, thus far, been a good thing.

"This is the third film I have done this year," he says. "It was the first film I did after Bond, and it was not a big commitment. It was a relatively short shoot for me. I just finished shooting a movie in Lithuania with [director] Ed Zwick and some of my best friends and several people I had wanted to work with. It was a personal thing that I really wanted to do. There is no doubt that playing Bond helped get it made, because I had been trying to make it for five or six years [before Bond]. You still have to go through the process and convince people that they should invest a lot of money on something that isn't necessarily going to make much of it back. But Bond made it easier to get the money."

In The Golden Compass, which opens on December 7 in Vancouver, Craig plays Lord Asriel, a scientist who goes to the northern part of his parallel universe to conduct experiments that may create a rift in its structures. The Golden Compass is the first of three books in a series called His Dark Materials. The distributor, New Line Cinema, wanted to keep the film's running time down to two hours to appeal to a younger audience. So the end of the first book, which prominently features Craig's character, has been held back until the second movie. Craig says that he doesn't think future shoots will interfere with his Bond movie schedule. "I assume that I will be in the next movie because a lot of this story has been left untold. There is no guarantee that there will be a second one until they look at the box office for this one, but I'm pretty sure that I can squeeze it in between Bonds."

Although Craig has been extremely busy in the past year and a half, he says that as he gets older (he will be 40 in March), he has found that it's easy to be preoccupied with avoiding unemployment to the point that other things get put on hold.

"I don't think any actor wants to be out of work, but I have had to make time for things like family and friends. You have to spend quality time with everyone in your life because it's easy to lose touch. I don't want to do that because they are the most important things to me."