Daniel Craig Has a Lot to Say About Booze
By Elizabeth Durand Streisand, Yahoo Celebrity
Daniel Craig (David Bailey/DuJour.com)
Daniel Craig likes his martinis. Well, actually, it’s unclear how he likes his martinis, but he definitely likes his booze. The James Bond vet recently opened up about his drinking preferences, preferred recovery method, and why he’s over the bar scene. (Hint: It’s not really by choice.)
Craig came to the subject in a rather roundabout way, when director Martin McDonagh was conducting an interview for DuJour magazine and asked him about whether he knows before the cameras start rolling where he’ll be filming when he plays 007. It turns out he doesn’t, but he did mention that the last Bond flick was shot in Mexico City.
“It ended up being one of my favorite cities I’ve ever been to,” he said. “But you can get into an awful lot of trouble there.” When the In Bruges helmer asked Craig if he was referencing the abundance of tequila, the 47-year-old star replied, “Anything you f—ing want!”
Daniel Craig (David Bailey/DuJour.com)
Here’s the part where we wish we had an image of Craig wearing a sombrero at Señor Frog’s while he throws back shots… and other things. That image will likely never become reality, however — not because he necessarily has anything against a little festive drinking — because it’s difficult for him to relax in such a sociable, public place.
“I mourn it slightly,” he said of the wedge fame creates between himself and the barstool. “I like to have a drink, and I love pubs and I love finding new pubs and places to socialize. But that has a limit on it now.”
Specifically, he blames technology. “Bars are hard, but that’s because of mobile phones,” he lamented. “I’ll do autographs all day long, and I’ll even do a picture at the end of an evening. But if I’m being photographed all night long in a bar, that pisses me off.”
This isn’t a new phenomenon for the married thesp, however. In November 2012 (when the last Bond installment came out), he discussed a time before we were all so instantly connected. “You talk to people in the movie business who have doing this 40 years and they all say the difference is that, back in the day, you could go and have a drink in the bar, get drunk, fall over, have a good time, relax, whatever, and no one would know about it. But now everyone’s got a camera. Not that all I want to do is get drunk in a bar, but that’s an example,” he explained to Vanity Fair. “So you can’t live a normal life anymore. Because it will become public knowledge that you’ve whatever —gotten drunk in a bar or skinny-dipped on a beach or something.”
He’s willing to play along with fans, though, provided they approach him with a bit of courtesy. “If you ask, I may say yes, but come up to me and say, ‘Would you like to take a photograph with me?’ If you’re f—ing sneaking photographs of me… it’s human nature, you’re sneaking something! I’m being f—ed with!” he explained before adding, “But people don’t see it as a problem. Maybe I’m delusional.”
For his part, Craig mostly avoids social media, admitting he doesn’t use Twitter (basically because he doesn’t want to be “abused”) or the Internet (probably for the same reason).
Daniel Craig (David Bailey/DuJour.com)
In addition to sacrificing his ability to walk into a pub and order a pint, Craig has sacrificed his ability to observe real-world drunks in their true environment. “That’s a danger I think, because I love playing drunks,” he revealed. “Drunk, damaged people: it’s like, bring them on!”
Still, on occasion, the star does apparently manage to enjoy a drink (or more), as he has a go-to hangover cure, you know, just in case. “There’s this thing called Pedialyte. It’s basically a diuretic; you give it to kids who are dehydrated,” he explained. “If you wake up in the morning and you’ve got one of those on standby and you down the whole lot… you can carry on drinking!”
(Editor’s note: Craig may be a great Bond, but he’s no doctor. Pedialyte is not a diuretic, which is a substance, like alcohol and caffeine, that promotes the production of urine and excretion of water from bodies.)
But how did he discover this magic bullet? Craig credits fellow Hollywood A-lister Mark Wahlberg. Walberg didn’t tell Craig about it directly, but somehow the information was passed along.
“I was told that’s what Mark swears by,” the Skyfall star explained, adding, “It’s the difference between life and death as far as I’m concerned.”
But while Craig hardly seems like the shy type, even he has moments where he’s at a loss for words.
“On a flight to New York recently, Alicia Keys and Desmond Tutu were on the plane. I didn’t go up to them. I smiled at Alicia Keys, but I couldn’t look Desmond Tutu in the eye. I wanted to go up to him and fall at his feet,” Craig recalls. “It was one of those situations where I blew it completely.”
Perhaps he just needed some of his favorite liquid courage.
