Casino Royale’s Daniel Craig was stirred but not shaken about getting suave, stunt-happy spy 007 just right.

LOS ANGELES—It’s never going to be easy to “be” James Bond. Or at least not for the actors who are hired to play the iconic Ian Fleming character. There are the stunts, the curious and sometimes skeptical fans, and, of course, the possibility that the actor will end up being “Bond” forever. You may get the part, but will it be the last memorable character you play?

It makes sense, then, that if you did get picked to play James Bond you would want to get it right. Eva Green, who plays an accountant who falls for 007 in Casino Royale (which opens Friday [November 17]), says the latest Bond, Daniel Craig, was determined to make sure that director Martin Campbell gave him some input into the making of the movie.

“Daniel fought with Martin almost every morning,” Green says in an L.A. hotel room. “Daniel almost always won.” Campbell, who was the director for the first of Pierce Brosnan’s four Bond films, says that the “discussions” were limited but were important to the development of the character. “If we didn’t agree, we would push and pull and then we would sit down and talk the scenes through. For one scene, we must have gone through 10 endings, and he [Craig] would say, ”˜Bond would not do that,’ and I think we got it right. I think that creative discussions are terrific as long as the end result is the right one.”

“We had passionate talks,” Craig says. “But you always do that on films. You are trying to create something and everyone is at a fever pitch to try to get it as good as possible. [I would ask] ”˜Are we missing a trick here? Are we doing this right?’ Things can get out of hand with a movie of this size. But we had a great script, and the one thing we had to stick to was that script and that piece of storytelling. The stunt scenes and the action sequences had to be part of the story. You don’t want to go and shoot two movies. Each had to fit into the other to make it as seamless as possible.”

Craig not only had to fight for Bond, he had to fight as Bond. Campbell wanted to “see Bond”, so Craig was called on to be involved in most of the stunt sequences. Although stunt men were brought in for the hardest falls, Craig fell enough times that reports from the set had him injured on several occasions. He says he got into shape before the film to avoid injury and to look the way he thought Bond should look.

“I have always kept fit,” he says. “I go to the gym, but I thought, ”˜I have to start pumping weights,’ because I knew that if he took off his shirt, people would think, ”˜Okay, he could do these things.’ And I couldn’t have made it through the stunts unless I had gotten into shape. Every stunt that occurred, it was me at some point, because I don’t know how else to do it. I felt that if I could do it, I should do it, because it’s a Bond movie. I just felt it was part of the job, and that is why I wanted to play the role in the first place. It was hardest at the beginning because I was pulling muscles all the time. You are constantly bouncing around. I had a hard time getting up every morning. I couldn’t move, so I had to roll myself out of bed and take a shower to get my muscles moving. Luckily, it was a big enough movie that we had a physical therapist on standby.”

Craig may have been worried about sacrificing his body for the part but he says that he was never concerned about sacrificing his career by playing such an iconic character. “I have done a lot of work that I am very proud of and that doesn’t go away. I think it [the idea of being stereotyped by playing Bond] is overblown because people concentrate on it too much. I am not going to go out and do something that is a reaction to this, and I am not going to go and say, ”˜I can’t take a small part because I have just done Bond.’ But I am not going to play a secret agent.”

The other pressure that eventually occurs with most Bonds comes from devoted fans of the movies. Although they don’t have annual conventions, they do have a protective sense of the franchise. Craig says that although he doesn’t feel overwhelmed by their concerns, he knows enough Bond fans to understand that the hiring of a new actor to play 007 can be a bit stressful for everyone involved.

“People feel very strongly about this series,” he says. “Normally, I do a movie and we show it to the press and then they comment on it and they either like it or they don’t like it. But reaction to this movie was coming three weeks before we even started shooting! I just said, ”˜Give me some time and let me get into this a bit.’ I certainly wouldn’t want to get into a tit-for-tat argument about the character with people who are very passionate about the franchise. I grew up wanting to be James Bond as much as anyone else, but I also wanted to be a professional soccer player–cum–rugby player–cum–astronaut. I think that was just part of growing up. But professionally, Bond didn’t register with me. I do have a lot of friends that know a lot about the character, and they set out to make sure I got it right.”

“Getting it right” usually means that the latest Bond is seen as being able to walk in the shoes of the more popular Bonds, which would now mean that any new actors would want to be favourably compared to Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Brosnan. Craig says that the franchise owners, Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, told him they wanted a different kind of Bond. (When asked if he wants his martini “shaken or stirred” the new Bond responds with, “Do I look like I give a damn?”)

However, he says that he felt that even if he was going to take Bond in a new direction, there were still elements of the character that had been forged by other actors that could not be abandoned.

“You have to respect what has gone before, and you have to take it on. I watched every moment of every movie and checked out what had gone wrong and what had gone right. But then you move on and think, ”˜Okay, that is set. That doesn’t go away, and now what about this.’ He is a hero figure. He is a guy who knows what is what. We all struggle in life to figure out how to deal with things, but he says, ”˜I know how to deal with it.’ When he walks into a situation, he goes, ”˜I am going to make this decision and I am going to make it now,’ and that is kind of exciting. He doesn’t tell people what decisions he is going to make, but he is pretty good at making them. If there is a change, it is that in the past you assumed he was thinking, ”˜Things are going to be okay because I can work it out.’ I try to bring to it this feeling that things might not be okay, because I think that is more interesting, dramatically.”