Craig tells Empire he really did consider exiting 007 role

Cover to Empire’s February 2020 issue

Daniel Craig, in a story in Empire magazine, said he actually did consider quitting the James Bond role after SPECTRE.

“I think I was ready to go,” Craig told the magazine. “If that that had been it, the world would have carried on as normal, and I would have been absolutely fine.”

One factor was the physical toll of doing SPECTRE, he said.

“There was a part of me going, ‘I can’t physically do this anymore.’ I felt genuinely that I needed to give up for own my own self-preservation as much as anything.”

The comments are in Empire’s February 2020 issue, which officially goes on sale Dec. 27. However, some scans of of the issue have shown up, including in a tweet by @springhousese. The tweet has one image of the opening page of text.

Craig told a somewhat different story on CBS’s Late Show in 2017.

“I always wanted to,” Craig said at that time about doing another Bond film after SPECTRE. “I needed a break.”

In the Empire story, Craig talked about how his thinking evolved.

“But somehow it felt like we needed to finish something off. If I’d left it at Spectre, something at the back of my head would have been going, ‘I wish I’d have done one more.'”

The scan of the one page of text includes details about how Christoph Waltz’s Blofeld fits into No Time to Die.