Daniel Craig: Seeking "Solace"

Before Casino Royale, James Bond fans were very unsure of a blonde, blue-eyed Bond but hot Daniel Craig (yes, we've met him and his eyes ARE that blue!) changed collective minds with his macho, kick-butt...yet romantic portrayal of the iconic super-spy who loses the love who betrays him. Now, in the new "Bonder" Quantum of Solace, the uber-agent is out after the baddies who offed his girlfriend Vesper and he's taking no prisoners! This is the first Bond film in history to be a sequel. It starts one hour after Casino Royale ends.

We've gotta say that friendly, good-humored Daniel is funny. He is also all you would expect him to be; slight tan, piercing light blue eyes that just laser right through you and, when we saw him dressed Bond-dapper in all black (suit, shirt, tie) we were a teensy tongue-tied after his entrance to our interview room in Beverly Hills. Then, we noticed that the buff actor's arm was in a color-coordinated black sling! Awwww, a Bond boo-boo? We had to ask......

TeenHollywood: I like that it's a black sling, color-coordinated.

Daniel: (smiling) Well, I had to try. I try to be color-coordinated with all my clothes. What can you do?

TeenHollywood: So, can I ask? What happened?

Daniel: No! (laughs) I've had a tear in the shoulder, and I think two Bond movies have just aggravated it and, during this one, it started aching really badly halfway through. I sort of thought with the potential actors strike, we had a deadline. If we didn't finish, we were screwed, so I went to see a surgeon and he just said, 'Fine, you might damage it more but you'll be fine and come and see me when you've had a rest.' So, six weeks ago I had surgery, at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and I'm well on the way, I've just got to keep it in this for a while.

TeenHollywood: Is Bond chipping away at you piece by piece?

Daniel: No. (laughs and pauses...) Yeah.

TeenHollywood: So now that you've been accepted as Bond, is the pressure off?

Daniel: I got over that a long time ago, about three weeks into shooting Casino Royale. We had a good film. We had a good crew, we had good actors, we had a good director so there's nothing else we can do to make this a better situation. All the pressure that was on, I put to bed, just completely put it to bed. By the time we'd got to the premiere in London, people were going, 'don't you feel vindicated now?' and I'm like, 'I feel like we've got a great movie'. I never wanted to get into a dialogue about it. So with this one, we have all the same pressures but in a very, very different way. We're on the back of success, thank goodness. We could have been on the back of a dud which would have just been (laughs) I can't imagine. There's different pressures. It's a 200 million dollar movie, I don't know how you could do that without thinking there's a little bit of pressure.

TeenHollywood: Your co-star, gorgeous Olga Kurylenko is certainly not playing the typical Bond girl. Bond doesn't hop in the sack with her. How was working with her?

Daniel: She's great. I was involved with the casting process and she came in and she just had this quiet kind of toughness about her. It's like there's this secret that she's carrying with her. She was kind of thrust into this and we started training. She just did a great job. Her (character's) story ties in so nicely with it and no, they don't get into bed, but they kiss you know (big smile and a laugh).

TeenHollywood: Your face seems more recognizable as doing many of the stunts in this film. Did you feel you did a lot more physically in this?

Daniel: You know, we learned a huge amount when we did Casino Royale, certainly I did, about how much I can do and what's the limit. I think we're getting better at making it look like it's me. I've got four or five guys, who work really closely with me, who have got incredible skills; fighting skills, gymnasts, acrobats. Luckily, they're all quite similar to me and I try to get as fit as they are, cause they're seriously fit, and then, I get my face in there in that key moment, to not pull the audience out. That's all I want. I don't want the audience to be watching an action sequence and then suddenly to go, 'Oh it's not him.'

TeenHollywood: The stunts in this seemed even more dangerous than the last one, especially all the fire at the end. Was there anything that scared you?

Daniel: No, no, not scared. I mean, trepidation but genuinely it's about getting it right. I only want to do it once. If you're standing on a roof and you're going to jump over I'm like, 'I don't want to do this more than once if I can help it'. That's all you've got going through your head.

TeenHollywood: So the fire scene didn't scare you....really? How was that accomplished? Set the scene for us.

Daniel: Well, we rehearsed it. We went to a fire testing facility. We basically went in there with fire suits on and just got as close as we could just to get ourselves used to the heat. And then you're covered in this flame retardant which is like gel, which is just plastered all over your body. At some point I had plastic hands on cause I'm smashing through things, and there's guys with fire extinguishers so you hope for the best. (laughs) We would plot it out really, really carefully, and all I cared about when we go for the takes is I didn't want to do that more than once, but after the third time, it was actually getting quite fun! (he laughs) It's sick the way that happens.

TeenHollywood: When you became Bond, did you think 'there's something about the old films that I want to preserve, but there's something about them that should change'?

Daniel: (Director) Mark (Forster) and I had a long conversation when we came to do this. We're big fans of the early Bonds, but also the movies that they spawned in the '60s, because they had a direct effect on movies all over. One of the biggest things that the early Bond movies did was go on location which was unusual for the time. If Bond went to Japan, he was really in Japan, and that's what we wanted to make happen in this movie; the feeling that you were transported to these places. And plus, trying to add some of the style that they developed back then. Even though there's reality in this and everybody will be saying, 'oh it's grittier and harder', I think it's a very stylized Bond and I like the fact that it is a look back.

TeenHollywood: Is there a certain place you would love to go for the next Bond film?

Daniel: A beach! (laughs) for about an hour and twenty minutes of the movie and then about ten minutes of action. That would really, really thrill me! I'd look out and explosions could be happening everywhere (while I'm) occasionally sipping my cocktail. (we laugh) But since travel is so much easier than it has been, there are fewer places to go that people haven't been. I can think of ten places I'd like to go, personally. Africa would be great. Asia would be wonderful. I'd love to go to China; Hong Kong, that would be somewhere fantastic.

TeenHollywood: What do you think about bringing in more of the old characters?

Daniel: Well, we solidified the relationships with Felix and with M and now I think we've got a very stable Bond world where we can just do whatever the hell we want, and that I find exciting. There's Miss Moneypenny, there's Q, there's all the other characters that we could conceivably bring in but actors want to reinvent these characters. Whatever happens, I'd like to sort of hand it on to some people with talent, that's all.

TeenHollywood: On a personal note, when somebody hurts you can you let it go? Bond is obsessed with payback. Can you let things go?

Daniel: Well, actually I think Bond can. He's not on a vendetta. About the title, Quantum Of Solace,(a little bit of peace) is actually what he's looking for. He just does his job. He's not out to take revenge. He might be a little angrier than he was in the first one (laughs). But, at the end, he gets the chance to do the guy, the one guy who's actually the person that's responsible, the actual guy that twisted the love of his life. And he says 'no'.

TeenHollywood: What about Daniel? Do you have to get even?

Daniel: No. I don't believe in it. Not if I can help it. I don't believe in it........(smiling)....kind of (he laughs).

TeenHollywood: Did the script for this just blow you away from the first?

Daniel: It's a much longer process than that. I've been working on this for nearly two years now, and so the ideas that we were putting together were coming back and forth, so no one ever presented me with (one script) and I went 'ahhhhh!' (laughs). I got drafts and I read drafts and we read ideas. It's a kind of continual process. It was not like that with the first one. That was really a kind of you know, security guards bringing the script.

TeenHollywood: So this was much more, for you, a collaborative process?

Daniel: Yeah, very much, yeah.

TeenHollywood: With this kind of an action film, is there room for actors to improvise on set?

Daniel: There's a lot of improv. I mean, obviously, the jumps are not improvised 'I'll go this way instead....'ahhhhhhhhh!' (he indicates falling and we laugh). That would really screw things up, but there are takes and you change lines. I'm not Robert DeNiro, believe me. I don't kind of go on and on take after take, but I do do three or four takes and change the lines around and sort of just screw around with it as much as I possibly can. Just to loosen it up, you know?

TeenHollywood: Bond takes up a lot of your time but haven't you done some other films recently?

Daniel: I've done three movies since I've done the last one, a little movie called Flashbacks that came out a couple of days ago, kind of very quietly because it's a small movie and then Defiance which is coming out at the end of the year. Now I'm just looking at scripts. Good scripts are hard to find, you have to go looking for them, so I'll keep doing that if I can.

TeenHollywood: Can you talk about your role in Defiance?

Daniel: It's a very little known story set in Belarus during the second world war about four brothers who organize a resistance not only against the German army but also against the local population who are siding with the German army. There's a forest which is around Belarus Lithuania which just goes on for miles and miles and miles and it's still impenetrable today. They went in there, and they committed acts of revenge, and then, formed a society and survived four years and got 1,500 people out of the forest, created schools, synagogues, factories, organized with the Russian partisans and it's just a good story. I'm one of the brothers.