Daniel Craig has a fringe. It’s thick, sweeping and sculptural, plunging down the facet of his brow like an Alpine mountain face. The perimeter frames a pair of yellow-tinted glasses sat on his broad nostril, and under that could be a patterned sweater knitted with a really heroic vary of colours. Craig stares on the digital camera and purses his lips. The general vibe is of a geography instructor on acid.
This glorious photograph is a part of a current advert marketing campaign, shot by David Sims, that the actor has completed for Loewe’s Fall-Winter 2024 assortment. The perimeter returns within the different images, the place Craig wears extra of Jonathan Anderson’s technicolor clothes. In a single shot, the 56-year-old scrunches his face up like he’s appreciating a very gnarly heavy steel riff. The marketing campaign has delighted the web. Numerous theories have Craig wanting like “a hacker working for Hans Gruber” from Die Exhausting; like he’s “starring in a biopic on Jürgen Klopp’s scholar protest years”; or like he’s “enjoying [a] particular unannounced set of soul, disco, and Balearic at a small invite-only forest pageant.”
It’s not the primary time Craig’s industrial work has delighted the web—principally, due to how totally different it’s to his beefy, steely tackle James Bond. Final November, he appeared in a video exhibiting off his favourite Omega watches, through which he was wearing an all-blue suit-and-tie ensemble with gold-rimmed, oval-shaped glasses. This vibe—uptight however conservatively fashionable—was assessed as being that of a European banker or EU bureaucrat. It’s “the very last thing a southern European finance minister sees earlier than agreeing to reform his nation’s pension system with a view to obtain central financial institution financing,” wrote one journalist, precisely.
Loewe/David Simms
Finishing the holy trinity is a industrial for Belvedere vodka directed by Taika Waititi. This was launched in November 2022, simply over a yr after Craig’s last look as Bond in No Time to Die, and riffs on him shrugging off the character. Within the black-and-white opening, Craig seems to be pensive and Bond-y in a cream go well with, striding by way of a pack of photographers to clamber into the again of a Rolls-Royce. Then he emerges from the other door in colour, Wizard of Oz-style, in a deeply minimize tank prime and leather-based jacket. Craig dances with abandon, thrusting his crotch like a dad 4 martinis down. It’s not fully ironic however not fully severe—type of just like the viral strikes of Future Islands frontman Samuel T Herring, when the band performed on Letterman a decade in the past.
Taken collectively, these three characters exhibit Craig’s elastic vary even in short, branded appearances. Individuals have likened the trio to the employees of an English division, or the totally different archetypes who dwell in Berlin. It’s very totally different to the standard roles taken in advertisements by actors—particularly of the Bond caliber—through which they’re often suave and horny however a bit bland. Craig is more than pleased to ham it up on digital camera, Waititi advised GQ in 2022. “He simply was nice and he wasn’t cynical about it, and he wasn’t reticent. He simply leaned straight in.”
