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Taking the Endurance Test

By Alex O'Connell
Times of London
November 25, 2004

He may be British cinema's latest blue-eyed boy, but Daniel Craig leaves Alex O'Connell cold.

Winter in Latvia. It makes a month filming "Cold Mountain" look like a luxury spa break. But the actor DANIEL CRAIG, who is there shooting the adaptation of Robert Harris's Soviet thriller "Archangel," claims he is no fair-weather thespian. "It's a good part and it's actually fun," he says, unconvincingly. The film revisits the stark landscape of Communist Russia. CRAIG plays an Oxford academic, whose fateful meeting with former Stalinist bodyguards leads to the uncovering of "a dangerous secret."

"It's "freeeeezing", CRAIG wimpers down the phone line, then slips into silence.

The marrow in his bones has clearly frozen and at the other end of the telephone line is a DANIEL CRAIG-shaped ice-lolly. "It snowed two days ago. But the sun might come out soon," he says, with the hopelessness of a depressed weather man.

But we're not here to talk about that BBC One drama, on television next Easter.

Rather, the subject is "Enduring Love," released this week.

It's based on Ian McEwan's 1998 novel and directed by Roger Michell (who also directed CRAIG in "The Mother"). CRAIG, 36, seen most recently as a cocaine-dealing wideboy in Matthew Vaughn's Britflick "Layer Cake," takes the male lead.

McEwan's novel is a brilliant musing on the nature of obsessive love and genetics.

On paper (well, McEwan's at least) Joe, CRAIG'S character, is clever, complicated and confused. He grabs you by the scruff and pulls you into the story, which begins when a day in the park goes awry. Joe and his girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton) witness a ballooning tragedy which threatens to burst their fragile relationship. Also, as a result of the incident, Joe, a science teacher, is stalked by a pathetic-looking man called Jed (Rhys Ifans) who is convinced that they are in love but in fact has a obsessive love disorder. "Joe has had a change in his life," CRAIG offers. "He doesn't know what he's going to do. He's studying genetics and finding out that we are all genetic mutations. He can't see that love is fantastic. Then he gets a big kick in the arse. The film starts off with all these likeable characters and then you throw into it something extraordinary. He doesn't believe in true love at first, that love endures."

Did CRAIG feel passionately about the book? "Not really, no," he says, offhandly, before correcting himself. "I mean, I hadn't read the book for about five years.

We were filming "The Mother" and Roger (Michell) said, 'Do you want to do "Enduring Love?" I said 'yes' because we have a great working relationship."

So he finished "Layer Cake" and two days later began a fortnight's rehearsals for "Enduring Love." "I didn't have much time to prepare," he says. "I read Richard Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene," I had a crack at Darwin."

Ifans took a more Brando-ish approach. "Rhys went out and stalked his girlfriend for a while and would go and sit on swings near my flat and wait for me," he laughs.

"Roger wouldn't do a film without complicated characters."

Yet so far few have raved about the movie adaptation. "Times" critic Wendy Ide talks of the "brilliant introduction" but says "the rest of the story struggles to match the vivid imagery of those first terrible moments". Anthony Lane in "The New Yorker" called the film a "jokeless gloomerama." It certainly takes itself very seriously. McEwan's Joe was a sophisticated, troubled hero; in the film version he is just rather vague and insipid. Unlike his portrayal of Ted Hughes in "Sylvia," you feel as though CRAIG never had anything to stick his molars into. CRAIG reads the crits and is aware that it isn't a surefire hit. On the surface he's unperturbed.

Was he, at least, happy with the way it went? "I think I'm very happy with it," he says. His voice now owes more to his Guildhall education than his childhood on the Wirral. "It's polarised opinion. I thought he (Lane) gave it too much attention," he says. Cue the standard actorly tirade against film writers: "I am always dubious of critics who spend 100 column inches saying how much they hate a movie."

Why?

He says he chose the film for three reasons: the book, Michell and Morton--the latter he has known for years "socially." He was delighted when McEwan came on set the first week of shooting, but said the novelist had no real desire to intervene.

"He was there for the balloon sequence and just stood and watched with us. He was suitably blown away. He really didn't get involved. It's the hardest thing for the novelist to write a script, you have to give it over and he was very, very happy that he gave it over to us."

CRAIG is stumped when asked if he has read any other McEwans. "Amsterdam," he says after a pause long enough to write a novella in. "I read a spate of them a few years ago, I can't remember much."

Trying to get any offered comment out of CRAIG today is like trying to get the Prince of Wales to join Class War. Perhaps he appreciates that he is on the cusp of serious stardom and has made a decision to be less open than he was when he first made the critics chew their pen tops with his brilliant turn as Geordie in the BBC series "Our Friends in the North." Next year he begins filming "Vengeance," Steven Spielberg's movie about the 1972 Summer Olympics, during which 11 Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists. "He's offered me the job," says Craig, with the enthusiasm of someone who has just signed their own death warrant. "It seems an awfully long way off."

Perhaps he's concerned that it will be a repeat of "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider."

Deciding to star in the computer game adaptation was, he has said, the "worst decision I've ever made." CRAIG denies he made the comment. "I wish it was the worst decision I'd made in my life," he harrumphs. What is the worst decision, then? "Want a list?" he snaps, before launching into a controlled post mortem. "It was just the right thing to do for me," he says. "Actually, maybe it wasn't. I couldn't get a reward out of it, except for going to Cambodia . There's always a silver lining."

Does it get harder to choose the right script? "Ninety per cent are crap and you have to needle the good ones out," he muses. "You can go chasing money but if you are going to make a decision on a job based on that then you have to accept the consequences, that it will only work financially and fame-wise."

CRAIG is clearly desperate to preserve his privacy. On the one hand, he is a middle-weight actor who starred alongside Michael Gambon in 2002 in Caryl Churchill's "A Number" at the Royal Court and just about held his own alongside Paul Newman and Tom Hanks in Sam Mendes's "Road to Perdition" (direct comparisons with Newman are overenthusiastic). On the other hand, his private life has brought his image downmarket as snaps of CRAIG with various belladonnas litter Heat and its tattier siblings.

It all began in January, when the Chester-born actor ditched his long-term girlfriend, the German actress Heike Makatsch (Emma Thompson's rival in "Love Actually"). Earlier that month he had said of that relationship: "I think we'll probably end up being together, I hope for a long time." By spring he was in the arms of the model Kate Moss, whom he dated for four months until she, allegedly, made it clear that she didn't want to be tied down. More recently he has been linked with his personal assistant Saskia Mitchell. When I bring up Moss the silence is painful."I can't talk about it," he says, finally. "It's all in the cuts. I can't talk about it."

Is your own love life a happy one? "I'm as happy as I can possibly be!" he says, perhaps at last getting to grips with his character.