UPDATE: A peculiar Craig interview is yanked

Daniel Craig

(UPDATE, March 11) : The supposed interview has been taken down from the Beyond site. If you click on the link below, you get a “Page not found” message. Apparently it was even more peculiar than it seemed this weekend.

Two theories readers have passed on: 1) It was a fake from the start. 2) It was an interview that was supposed to be embargoed until a later date. Admittedly, I have no idea.

UPDATE II (7 p.m., New York time, March 11): The James Bond MI6 website examined the quotes in the now-withdrawn story and matches them up against previous interviews. The MI6 story notes other fishy elements.

(ORIGINAL POST, March 10): A peculiar interview with Daniel Craig was published online by Beyond magazine.

Why describe it as peculiar? In the text, it says, “Cameras began rolling on Bond 25 earlier this year.”

Bond 25 had an announced start date of March 4 — just six days ago. And that was before the release date was pushed back to April 2020 and it emerged that Scott Z. Burns was spending four weeks doing a rewrite of the script.

So what does “earlier this year” mean exactly? It’s hard to know reading the story.

Meanwhile, Craig appears to say that Bond 25 will really, really will be his finale.

“I have thoroughly enjoyed it,” Craig says in the interview.

It’s also clear that scribe Sarah Freeman is sympathetic to Craig. “On set, it’s now hard to imagine Bond being played by anyone else.”

Again, it makes it sound as if Craig was interviewed during Bond 25 filming. And there’s this passage toward the end:

And with that he’s off. Back to filming his final Bond.