Daniel Craig Wasn’t the ‘Happiest Person’ Playing Bond, Says Dave Bautista

Dave Bautista knows there are many layers to his “Glass Onion” co-star Daniel Craig.

Bautista couldn’t help but compare experiences working with Craig on “Spectre” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” over seven years. Bautista told Entertainment Weekly that the 2015 James Bond installment “Spectre” was an unhappy situation for Craig, who famously led the film as 007. Bautista co-starred as Mr. Hinx on “Spectre.”

“He was really put through it on Bond,” Bautista said. “You could feel that he was under a lot of pressure. He didn’t seem like the happiest person on Bond, but on ‘Glass Onion,’ it was the complete opposite.”

Bautista continued, “He was just so much fun, and he was always smiling and happy and interacted a lot more. On ‘Spectre,’ there wasn’t a whole lot of interaction with the whole cast. But ‘Glass Onion’ was the complete opposite. We were always together. So I got to know him better as a person and actually see him do his thing.”

Craig began playing James Bond in 2006 with “Casino Royale.” He ended his turn as the beloved fictional MI6 agent with 2021’s “No Time to Die.” For the “Knives Out” films, Craig plays queer detective Benoit Blanc, almost an inverse of Bond.

“It’s really a weird thing when you watch someone transform from Bond to Benoit Blanc,” Bautista added. “It’s amazing because I’m always in awe of people who can transform themselves like that. This is why I wanted to be an actor, because I wanted to be that guy. As odd as it sounds — because I look like a fucking gorilla — I wanted to be a chameleon.”

Craig told EW that he is willing to continue playing Benoit Blanc “as long as we’re having fun and [writer-director] Rian [Johnson] is up for it,” adding, “What a wonderful thing to be able to do. I should be so lucky.”

With Bond, Craig reflected on his tenure, calling his second Bond film “Quantum of Solace” a “shitshow.”

“I would sort of yearn [for] the person I was when I did ‘Casino.’ Too much knowledge sometimes is not a good thing,” Craig said in 2021. “I was sort of in the dark about a lot of things, about how things worked, the mechanics of it, how the world really viewed Bond — all of those things. I just didn’t understand them. Then I started to understand them, the weight of it sort of bore down. The trouble with [‘Quantum of Solace’], it was a bit of a shitshow, to say the least, the full weight of it was there I kind of think that made me probably lock up. Thankfully, for me, it’s been about loosening it and loosening it and trying to get back to that feeling of ‘Casino,’ which was ‘It’s James Bond, come on, enjoy yourself. Let’s have a good time.’”

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