Daniel Craig's "Dragon Tattoo"
For the guy who's best known as playing James Bond, the British secret agent who lives his life without an iota of fear, actor Daniel Craig couldn't wait to put on a new persona, one that comes a bit closer to the reality of life. So when director David Fincher offered him the plum role of investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist in the Hollywood version of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," Craig jumped at the chance.
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"The most important thing about this character for me was to make him as real and as believable as possible," the ruggedly handsome 43-year-old explained during a press conference in New York City.
"I wanted to put the reality into this. He gets shot at and he runs away. I mean, screaming. Like anybody else would," he elaborated. "That was really the key. It was that easy. What I love about this character is that he doesn't have to prove he's a man. He's a nice guy. He doesn't have to go around beating his chest."
Making the choice to star in the first of three planned movies based on the best-selling Stieg Larsson "Millennium" novels wasn't much of a stretch for the actor, who is reportedly in talks to star in five more Bond films over the coming ten years. More to the point was the fact that the novels have already been made into three Swedish movies, movies that many English-speaking fans have already seen. But Craig believes that the thrilling stories of Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander and the mysteries that they solve along the way are strong enough to hold up to multiple versions.
"That doesn't worry me," Craig proclaimed. "I think that the source material is good enough. And I think that everybody wins in this situation. I think we have sixty-five million readers of the book. And we have lots of people that have seen the Swedish/Danish version of the movie. And we may get millions of other people to see this movie. And everybody's going to go back and read the book and watch the Swedish version. It's a win/win."
Plus, as Craig tells it, he's the sort of actor that just doesn't worry about the rest of the world's perception of what he does.
"The less you think about what other people think about, in this industry, the less you think about what other people think, the better. The more original you can be," he explained. "You can't go into a project thinking, 'Oh, how would these people like it? How would those people like it?' You've just got to get on with what you want to be, and be single-minded about it. And you can't please everybody, anyway."
Plus, when it comes to "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," Daniel Craig is actually pleased himself.
"After I saw it, I got in contact with David and I said that this is one of the rare occasions in my career where [what I saw] was the movie that we set out to make. That's kind of the best thing I could say really about it. It was just, it's actually just great. I was very, very pleased."
Jenny Peters' credits include writing on film, celebrities, restaurants and fashion for publications including "USA Today Weekend," the Los Angeles Daily News," "Buzz" and "Cosmopolitan." She currently pens the "Variety," "VPage" and "Seen and Heard" columns, and is the West Coast Bureau Chief of "Fashion Wire Daily."
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