When I first got the part, people kept asking 'Have you done the line yet?''' Craig says, settling into a lawn chair on a patch of grass at the airfield. ''But, honestly, I didn't rehearse it at all. I didn't practice it in the mirror every morning or anything like that. I didn't want to even think about saying it because I didn't want it to be this weight around my neck. I just wanted to get on with it and not blow it.''
The line he's referring to is just six little words — ''The name is Bond, James Bond'' — but there's hardly an actor in the English-speaking world who hasn't imagined uttering it just once. There was certainly no shortage of applicants lining up to say it in Casino Royale. Hugh Jackman has admitted wanting the part so badly he even started a rumor that he was up for the role, just to make sure his name was in the mix. Pierce Brosnan made it clear he wanted to continue playing Bond (although he didn't quite mesh with the whole reinvention theme), while Henry Cavill (Tristan & Isolde) and Goran Visnjic (ER) were among those who tested for the film. (Rumors about who would play the Bond girl, incidentally, were also rampant, with names like Charlize Theron and Thandie Newton being floated; ultimately Green was cast just after filming began last January.)
But from the moment Broccoli saw Craig's 2004 turn as a dashing coke dealer in the English gangster flick Layer Cake, he jumped to the top of the short list. ''He's everything Bond should be,'' she gushes. ''He's sexy and charming and virile, but can also be dangerous.'' And he's young — the first actor to play Bond born in the post-Dr. No era — making him all the more attractive to Sony Pictures, the studio that picked up the franchise when it bought MGM in 2005 (along with the rights to Casino Royale, which MGM had acquired through a lengthy court battle that ended in 1999). ''We considered every actor in the world,'' says Sony chairman Amy Pascal, exaggerating only slightly. ''But after Barbara saw him in Layer Cake, Daniel became the front-runner. From then on, he was the one to beat.''
Surprisingly, Broccoli and Wilson had no problem persuading Sony to let them tamper with their newly purchased property. ''When it comes to franchises, they know what they're doing,'' Pascal says. Even more surprising — positively shocking, in fact — is that Royale got its original green light while still at MGM, where creative tension with the Bond producers often created a Cold War-like chill, and where the old-fashioned time-tested Bond formula had kept the studio afloat for years. ''They obviously would have been happy to let it continue the way it had been going,'' Broccoli says, ''but they actually did sort of go along with our idea. We didn't have a finished script or an actor, but we were heading into preproduction when the sale to Sony happened.''
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