Shocking anyone who’s never read any of the many deeply dispirited interviews he used to give right after he was done filming a Bond movie—including one in which he infamously noted that he’d rather “slash my wrists” than play the character again at the moment—Daniel Craig is apparently a lot happier playing Benoit Blanc than Britain’s most lethal spy. This is per co-star Dave Bautista, who’d presumably know, having appeared with Craig in both Spectre—his penultimate Bond film—as well as in the upcoming Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
Bautista was talking with Entertainment Weekly about Rian Johnson’s upcoming mystery, which will get a short theatrical run starting on November 23 before sliding onto Netflix the following month. On the topic of Craig, Bautista says he’s seen a marked change between his morale on the two sets:
You could feel that he was under a lot of pressure. He didn’t seem like the happiest person on Bond, but on Glass Onion, it was the complete opposite. He was just so much fun, and he was always smiling and happy and interacted a lot more. On Spectre, there wasn’t a whole lot of interaction with the whole cast. But Glass Onion was the complete opposite. We were always together. So I got to know him better as a person and actually see him do his thing.
In other interviews, Craig has stated that he’s happy to play drawling detective Blanc for pretty much as long as Johnson is willing to keep making these movies; it’s clear, from Knives Out, and from promo materials for Glass Onion, that he’s having a blast playing a character who can, say, smile without it feeling like a major break in character, or ramble a bit about the metaphysical importance of donut holes without it seeming wildly out of his grim and bitter character.
