The movie that made Daniel Craig want to become an actor: “It felt like a movie that I discovered”

It’s hard to imagine Daniel Craig as anything other than a movie star. Ever since he scored the role of James Bond in 2006, he’s been an inescapable face at the box office. Even before he donned the 007 moniker, he had proven himself to be a formidable character actor, playing everything from a murderous priest in Elizabeth to the muse and lover of painter Francis Bacon in Love Is the Devil.

Craig grew up near Liverpool and left home at 16 to join the National Youth Theatre in London. Although his first roles were on the stage, he had always wanted to be in movies. In a recent interview on the SmartLess podcast, Craig recounted how, as a kid, visiting his local cinema helped shape his career decades down the line, especially after he saw one particular science fiction classic.

“We had a little cinema in the town I grew up in,” he said, “Which was, you know, a fleapit.”

At the time, he remembered, movies would do the rounds of the cinemas across the country, and by the time they finally ended up in his town, they’d already been out for months. He remembered seeing Bill Murray’s comedy Stripes and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s prehistoric fantasy Quest for Fire, but it was a Ridley Scott movie that changed everything for him.

“Blade Runner I remember seeing in the cinema on my own, with kind of an orange juice,” he said. “I had no idea, it was like, blind.” It was playing as a double bill with the Sean Connery space movie Outland, and when that film finished, he got a drink and returned to his seat, unaware of what he was about to see.

“The fact that movies could look like that, feel like that, and do that to you was just like, the thing,” he said. “I’d never experienced it. And it felt like a movie that I discovered, that it was nothing to do with Gone with the Wind or It’s a Wonderful Life – or the Bond movies even.”

Craig was ahead of his time in his appreciation for Ridley Scott’s classic, and it was no coincidence that he was alone in the theatre when he saw it. Despite being considered one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, Blade Runner was a flop when it was released, dismissed by critics for being overly sombre, existential, and confusing.

Interestingly enough, there was another future powerhouse of cinema who was harbouring similar sentiments at the time. Somewhere in London, a young Christopher Nolan had acquired a VHS tape of the film since he was too young to see it in the cinema. “Even on that small screen, something about the immersion of that world and the creation of that world really spoke to me and I watched that film hundreds of times,” Nolan said later.

For Craig, it wasn’t a particular performance in Blade Runner that made him want to become an actor, it was, like Nolan suggested, about the world that Scott had created. He didn’t even question whether or not he could make it into the film industry. When asked whether he felt that filmmaking and Hollywood were unattainable for a teen growing up in a small town in England, he was dismissive, saying simply, “I was an arrogant little bitch.”

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