Do we like Daniel Craig?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and company with no court or misconduct trouble found, held back by a couple of fence-sitting moments and thin sourced charity.
Craig grew up in Chester and then Liverpool, raised by his art-teacher mum after his parents split when he was small. Theatre trips with her sparked the acting bug, and he joined the National Youth Theatre in London at 16 before Guildhall. The breakout was the BBC drama Our Friends in the North in 1996, and by 2005 he was Bond, copping fan grumbling that he was too blond and too old. He has said he took the job “to change my life”, which is about as honest as it gets.
If you came for scandal, we've got nothing for you: no court outcomes and no misconduct allegations against him turned up in our searches. The closest thing to a stoush was Venice in 2024, when a journalist asked whether Bond could be gay and his Queer director Luca Guadagnino stepped in with “let's be adults in the room for a second”. Craig later told the Sunday Times, as reported by The Week, “It's just not a conversation I wanted.”
On the harm test, he went into Queer, a gay love story, and said of representing the LGBTQ+ community, “I don't think that's my place”. That is a straight actor being modest, not an attack on anyone, though some will want more warmth. On politics, he told GQ the Bond team “struggled to keep Trump out of this film” and called the climate of humiliating others cowardly. We found nothing from him on climate, vaccines or migrants either way, so that gap is honest.
His recent work is in good company. He reunited with Rian Johnson for Wake Up Dead Man, the third Knives Out mystery, and told TheWrap the role “Doesn't hurt as much” as Bond. Before that came Queer with Guadagnino and Drew Starkey. Nothing new has turned up on him lately beyond that run of work, and no harmful collaborators showed up in what we checked.
The sourced good stuff is modest. In 2022 he received a CMG, the same honour Bond holds, for services to film and theatre. His long run of charity or kind acts isn't something we could pin to a dated page we could open, so we won't pretend to a long list. He's also stayed the same self-deprecating, grounded bloke through nearly two decades of Bond fame.