Daniel Craig has a fringe. It’s thick, sweeping and sculptural, plunging down the side of his forehead like an Alpine mountain face. The fringe frames a pair of yellow-tinted glasses sat on his broad nose, and below that is a patterned sweater knitted with a truly heroic range of colors. Craig stares at the camera and purses his lips. The overall vibe is of a geography teacher on acid.
This wonderful photo is part of a recent ad campaign, shot by David Sims, that the actor has done for Loewe’s Fall-Winter 2024 collection. The fringe returns in the other photos, where Craig wears more of Jonathan Anderson’s technicolor garments. In one shot, the 56-year-old scrunches his face up like he’s appreciating a particularly gnarly heavy metal riff. The campaign has delighted the internet. Various theories have Craig looking like “a hacker working for Hans Gruber” from Die Hard; like he’s “starring in a biopic on Jürgen Klopp’s student protest years”; or like he’s “playing [a] special unannounced set of soul, disco, and Balearic at a small invite-only forest festival.”
It’s not the first time Craig’s commercial work has delighted the internet—mostly, because of how different it is to his beefy, steely take on James Bond. Last November, he appeared in a video showing off his favorite Omega watches, in which he was dressed in an all-blue suit-and-tie ensemble with gold-rimmed, oval-shaped glasses. This vibe—uptight but conservatively stylish—was assessed as being that of a European banker or EU bureaucrat. It’s “the last thing a southern European finance minister sees before agreeing to reform his country’s pension system in order to receive central bank financing,” wrote one journalist, accurately.
Completing the holy trinity is a commercial for Belvedere vodka directed by Taika Waititi. This was released in November 2022, just over a year after Craig’s final appearance as Bond in No Time to Die, and riffs on him shrugging off the character. In the black-and-white opening, Craig looks pensive and Bond-y in a cream suit, striding through a pack of photographers to clamber into the back of a Rolls-Royce. Then he emerges from the opposite door in color, Wizard of Oz-style, in a deeply cut tank top and leather jacket. Craig dances with abandon, thrusting his crotch like a dad four martinis down. It’s not completely ironic but not completely serious—kind of like the viral moves of Future Islands frontman Samuel T Herring, when the band played on Letterman a decade ago.
Taken together, these three characters show off Craig’s elastic range even in brief, branded appearances. People have likened the trio to the staff of an English department, or the different archetypes who live in Berlin. It’s very different to the usual roles taken in ads by actors—especially of the Bond caliber—in which they’re usually suave and sexy but a bit bland. Craig is more than happy to ham it up on camera, Waititi told GQ in 2022. “He just was great and he wasn’t cynical about it, and he wasn’t reticent. He just leaned straight in.”
And as the Belvedere ad makes all but explicit, this largely seems to be about Craig purging himself of 007. Though there’s always been a streak of camp in the character’s tradition—Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan, we’re looking at you—Craig played it with throbbing heterosexuality. Which perhaps explains why he's exploring the wide spectrum of male sexuality with his recent work. After all, he’s now increasingly well known as Benoit Blanc, star detective of the Knives Out series, with a thick Southern accent and Hugh Grant cameoing in Glass Onion as his boyfriend.
That Craig is so obviously having fun in his ad work, rather than just collecting a check, makes him that most noble of A-listers: one who still finds depthless joy in his craft, rather than simply hopping from franchise to franchise. A role as big as Bond threatens to overshadow the entire career of any actor who takes it, but Craig has shown the right way to move forward: peel off the dinner jacket and get weird.
This story originally appeared on British GQ with the title 'Long live Daniel Craig's freaky era'