A ripped Daniel Craig appears shirtless on the new issue of GQ — with the magazine hitting newsstands shortly after the release of his final James Bond film was delayed amid coronavirus fears.
The 52-year-old star — who has played Bond since 2006’s “Casino Royale,” when he famously stepped out of the ocean without a shirt — shows his muscled physique on the magazine’s first dual US/UK cover, which hits newsstands on March 17.
Producers announced last week that the release date for “No Time to Die” has been pushed back to Nov. 20. The official premiere had previously been scheduled for March 31 in the UK, with a US release date of April 10.
Talking about his role for the April issue, Craig told the publication he was initially hesitant to take the job because he wanted to continue to be a private person.
“I could be anonymous in the world,” Craig said he thought if he didn’t accept. “It was genuinely like, ‘My life is going to get f—ked if I do this’ … It’s just ludicrous. But it was all defense.”
Since taking on the gig, Craig has had the longest tenure as James Bond compared to his predecessors. But “No Time to Die,” his fifth and final installment in the franchise, almost didn’t happen.
In 2015, after “Spectre” came out, he famously said “I’d rather … slash my wrists” than do another Bond movie.
He now says to GQ, “I was never going to do one again. I was like, ‘Is this work really genuinely worth this, this whole thing? And I didn’t feel … I physically felt really low. So the prospect of doing another movie was just like, it was way off the cards. And that’s why it has been five years.”
However, Craig said he has come have a newfound respect for Bond, whom he thinks represents someone “trying to do the job and doesn’t want any f—king publicity.”
“And this is a joke, because he drives a f—king Aston Martin and does all these ridiculous things. But these people exist,” he said in the April issue, the mag’s first dual US/UK cover story. “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. But that’s not the way the world works now, it’s about humiliating others to save one’s own skin. And it’s cowardly, it’s just f—king cowardly.”