Daniel Craig talks Bond and `The Visiting`

Daniel Craig heads off to the Czech Republic this month to shoot Casino Royale, his debut as the sixth actor to play James Bond 007. You might think he'd be over the moon about his newfound fortune - reports USA Today.

But on this sunny day in the Capital City, he is all business. And the business at hand is playing Nicole Kidman's love interest in the alien thriller The Visiting, a reworking of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's directed by Germany's Oliver Hirschbiegel, who caused a sensation with a humanized Hitler in Downfall.

From afar, Craig comes off as calm and collected in a black turtleneck and tailored jacket.

But score a little close-up time with the shaggy blond Brit, whose strikingly craggy features suggest he has squeezed a lot of living into his 37 years, and he tends to get jittery. But he does give the courtesy of a reply when asked whether he is excited about playing Bond in Casino Royale. It arrives in theaters in November.

"I am in a very level place at the moment because I'm doing this," he says, referring to The Visiting. "And I'm very much concentrating on doing this." About Bond, he says, "As much as it's a huge thing, it's just another job at the moment."

Is he tired of all the media frenzy yet?

"Look, ask me in four years time. I'll tell you then."

Craig, whose résumé includes both the commercial (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Road to Perdition) and the arty (Sylvia, Enduring Love), is even more mum about his private life. You can't blame him, given the uncomfortable rumors about him hooking up with Layer Cake co-star Sienna Miller after her split with on-again beau Jude Law, a pal of Craig's.

Interviews conducted right after the casting announcement in October reveal a Craig who's somewhat insecure about his future Bond-age. As he told Melbourne's Herald Sun: "I never really wanted to do James Bond. I want to make big movies and make as much as I possibly can.

"The trouble is this, and someone said this to me; it kind of goes: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Danny Craig? It sounds odd to me. I really don't want to get the rap for destroying that franchise."

Kidman is confident her co-star will triumph as Bond.

"I think Daniel will just smoke in it," she says. "He is such an accomplished actor. Stephen Daldry (who directed Kidman in The Hours and Craig on the London stage) said to me, 'He is the best actor in England, and if you get a chance to work with him, do it.' "

Suggest to Craig that it is good that audiences will get to know him first in such movies as Munich, in which he plays an Israeli assassin, and The Visiting, due in August, and he shifts in his chair.

He is slightly more keen on chatting about his first sci-fi feature. He says he agreed to do The Visiting because "Nicole was doing it. And Oliver is doing it. I think Downfall is one of the best films in the past couple years."

Then Craig rushes off to change his shirt for an upcoming scene. Like James Bond, he is capable of making a great escape.

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