THE NEXT CHAPTER

Shortly before midnight, on a damp Friday last October, Daniel Craig shot his last scene as James Bond. It was a chase sequence, outside, on the back lot of Pinewood Studios, just west of London. The set was a Havana streetscape – Cadillacs and neon. The scene would have been filmed in the Caribbean in the spring, if Craig hadn’t ruptured his ankle ligaments and had to undergo surgery. He was 37 and blond when he was cast as the world’s most famous spy, in 2005. He is 51 now, his hair is dirty gray, and he feels twinges of arthritis. “You get tighter and tighter,” Craig told me recently. “And then you just don’t bounce.”

So there he was, being chased down a faked-up Cuban alleyway in England on a dank autumnal night. He was being paid $37m. It was what it was. Every Bond shoot is its own version of chaos, and the making of No Time to Die , Craig’s fifth and final film in the role, which is released on April 8, was no different. The first director, Danny Boyle, quit. Craig got injured. A set exploded. “It feels like how the fuck are we going to do this?” Craig said. “And somehow you do.” About 300 people were working on the final stretch of filming at Pinewood, and everyone was pretty fried. The director, Cary Fukunaga, had shot the movie’s ending – the true farewell to Craig’s Bond – a few weeks earlier. The last days were about collecting scenes that had gotten lost or flubbed in the previous, exhausting seven months. It was just an accident of the schedule that in his very final frames as Bond – a cinematic archetype that Craig transformed for the first time since the ’60s – he was in a tuxedo, disappearing into the night. The cameras rolled and Craig ran. That bulky, desperate run. “There was smoke,” he said. “And it was like, ‘Bye. See you… I’m checking out.’”

Craig isn’t the type to linger on moments like these. For the most part, he blocks them out. “You can ignore these things in life or you can sort of… It’s like family history, isn’t it?” he told me. “The story kind of gets bigger and bigger. I feel a bit like that with movie sets: this legend builds up.” Bond is fraught with legends already. More men have walked on the Moon than have played the part, and Craig has been Bond for the longest of all – 14 years. (Sean Connery did two comeback gigs, but his main spell lasted only five.) The films are also, insanely, a family business, which only intensifies the sense of folklore. Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli made Dr. No, the first film in the franchise, in 1962. Fifty-eight years and 25 movies later, the producers are his daughter, Barbara Broccoli, and stepson, Michael G Wilson, who began his Bond career on the set of Goldfinger, in 1964.

The films go toe-to-toe with Marvel: Craig’s did around the same at the box office, $1.6bn, as . At the same time, they are weirdly artisanal, bound by tradition, a certain way of doing things. The offices of Eon Productions, which makes the movies, are a short walk from Buckingham Palace. The theme tune hasn’t changed for half a century. The stunts are largely real. The scripts are a nightmare. There is a slightly demonic, British conviction that it will all work out in the end. “There has always been an element that Bond has been on a wing and a prayer,” Sam Mendes, who directed two of Craig’s 007 movies, told me. “It is not a particularly healthy way to work.” Reckoning with any of this doesn’t actually help if you’re the frontman. Craig has spent a lot of his time as James Bond trying not to think at all. While making , he taped some interviews with Broccoli and Wilson about his years in the role. There was a lot that he simply couldn’t remember. “Stop fucking thinking and just fucking act,” Craig said once, like it was an incantation. “It’s almost that. Because so