re: Daniel Craig says they struggled to keep Trump out of the new film

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During our conversations, Craig didn’t want to talk much about real-world affairs. Not because he isn’t engaged (Craig opposed Brexit and, as a U.S. citizen, has given money to support Bernie Sanders), but because once you start, it’s hard to talk about anything else. “We struggled to keep Trump out of this film,” Craig told me of No Time To Die. “But of course it is there. It’s always there, whether it’s Trump, or whether it’s Brexit, or whether it’s Russian influence on elections or whatever.” Like many Britons who have left home—Craig and Weisz are based in New York—he is baffled by the country’s seemingly inward turn since 2016. “There are British people working in the top industries in the world and at the top of those industries. We do that, and we are good at that. And somehow we’re kind of breaking all that apart,” he told me. “Whether that’s breaking from Europe.… There is a sort of nihilism, isn’t there?”

It is a stretch, but Craig sometimes sees Bond as an avatar for a kind of selfless public service that doesn’t seem to hold in our populist, polarized moment. “There’s something I feel that Bond represents, someone who’s there, trying to do the job and doesn’t want any fricking publicity,” he said. “And this is a joke, because he drives a fricking Aston Martin and does all these ridiculous things. But these people exist.… It’s the ambulance service. I know it’s terribly kind of romantic. But they are people who are just getting on with it and saving people’s lives.” He despairs of the grandstanding of Trump and Boris Johnson and the generalized hysteria of social media—the absence of a certain adult indifference. “But that’s not the way the world works now,” Craig said. “It’s about humiliating others to save one’s own skin. And it’s cowardly, it’s just fricking cowardly.”

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