Daniel Craig on sex, drugs and Hollywood burnout

In his latest film, Daniel Craig plays an arrogant, fortysomething British actor who loses his soul in Hollywood. Is he trying to tell us something? Liz Hoggard of The Independent interrogates the Bond star about his risqué pet project...

Daniel Craig is telling me about the first time he kissed a girl as a teenager. "You can remember those feelings of, 'Oh my God, we're touching!' You'd read about it in magazines but nothing could prepare you, and then suddenly, 'Oh my God, I'm doing it!' Those moments at 15 define the rest of your life. Everything starts firing, suddenly the electricity starts, the connectors start happening... you might be going to have sex at some point. And it's a huge emotional turmoil. It certainly was for me," he laughs in embarrassed recognition, "and I'm sure it was for everybody else. And then there's another leap: you might be an adult soon, and what does that mean?"

Is this really James Bond talking? Well, no, not quite. But still, there's something extraordinary about one of the world's biggest movie stars talking about his raw, teenage self (it's tricky to imagine Pierce Brosnan, let alone Roger Moore, getting so worked up about their confused adolescences). But the man who dragged Ian Fleming's suave, chilly secret agent into the 21st century seems keen to remind us that he's not to be mistaken in any way for his best-known character.

Craig may be the new star in the Hollywood firmament after the £300m box-office success of Casino Royale and he might have earned a Bafta nomination for the role, but he's not about to abandon the interesting, artsy films that were his bread and butter before he beefed up to woo Eva Green in those tight, blue swimming trunks. And after two decades toiling in showbusiness, neither is Craig wasting the chance to flex his new-found muscles and help a few friends out in the industry. Which is why the subject is snogging. It's one of the reasons Craig chose to take a part in his new British film, Flashbacks of a Fool, a coming-of-age story set largely in an English seaside town of the late-1970s. "There's lots of sex in the movie," says Craig, who then adds sweetly: "but also electric moments of just hand-holding."

In Flashbacks of a Fool, Craig, who is 40, plays Joe Scott, an arrogant fortysomething British film star whose Hollywood career is foundering on drink, drugs and escort girls. Scott is called back to England when his best friend dies, whereupon the film flashes back to a doomed romantic episode in Scott's youth. "The premise in Flashbacks of a Fool is I play an 'ageing' movie star. (Someone said that the other day, and I went, 'I'm not ageing!' But I am.) I play someone who's had a huge amount of success and hasn't really learnt anything. He's all set up with a huge house; you'd imagine he'd have supreme happiness, but he's a fuck-up. He has no direction in life."

Only some of which might apply to Daniel Craig when I meet him in his suite at London's Claridge's hotel. He's dressed in expensive-looking black polo shirt and jeans, but is still as entertainingly sweary as on the other occasions we've met for interviews. With him is his American girlfriend of three years, Satsuki Mitchell, 29 (it's rumoured they will marry after he has finished the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, which is currently shooting in Chile).

Mitchell, a film producer, has accompanied Craig throughout his time with the Bond circus – indeed, he might well have turned into a bit of a Joe Scott had it not been for Mitchell's unerring support since he signed a three-year contract to play the cinematic icon in 2005: "Being on your own would be sad, sick and weird," he says. "I don't trust myself. I need that balance." And it's not just himself that he has to look out for: he has a 15-year-old daughter, Ella, from his first marriage to the Scottish actress Fiona Loudon, whose privacy he guards fiercely. Craig has also said recently that he's thinking – only thinking, mind – about more babies when he finally gets some "down time".

'Flashbacks of a Fool' was written and directed by the award-winning British music-video director Baillie Walsh. Craig and Walsh met on the set of John Maybury's 1998 Francis Bacon biopic, Love is the Devil (Walsh was Maybury's partner at the time). "We just hit it off immediately. He's made seminal musical videos such as Massive Attack's 'Unfinished Sympathy' and I love his work with INXS," Craig says. The two remained close: "Baillie is my closest male friend. He wrote the script [for Flashbacks...] about six years ago, with me in mind. I think it's semi-autobiographical for him, because he grew up in Clacton-on-Sea, but he knows there's lots of stuff in it I share feelings about. We've had an on-and-off goal of trying to get it off the ground. It just so happened that I did James Bond, and I think that helped a little bit."

Craig acknowledges with a grin that the film's subject matter is pretty close to home. After all, he is a recent arrival on the film-star A-list, and plenty of his peers would run a mile from a film that opens with their character taking cocaine in the nude. Baillie Walsh agrees: "It was a brave choice for Dan," the director tells me later. "He's Bond and he wants to protect that, but he throws himself into the role. I think it's good for him to take those risks, I think he needs to. At the beginning of the film he looks terrible. And thank God he does. But I don't think he'll lose face over it."

The film is set in the era of glam rock. To a soundtrack of Roxy Music and David Bowie, the young Scott falls in love with a girl his own age, but is distracted, with tragic consequences, by an affair with an older woman. The film stars British character actors Helen McCrory, Jodhi May, Mark Strong (Craig's co-star in the 1996 TV drama Our Friends in the North) and veteran British actress Miriam Karlin, now 83. The teenage Scott is played by rising star Harry Eden (Pure, Oliver Twist), who is a remarkable ringer for Craig. The film is about memory, says Craig, and the fact that we can ignore incidents from our past for only so long. "I know in my life there's stuff that will come back because I haven't dealt with it, and it's the same with everybody."

Which is all very well, but had it not been for Craig's new clout, the film might have remained a pipe dream of his and Walsh's – Craig not only stars in it, he's an executive producer. "Baillie's got a huge filmic knowledge, and I wanted to see what he could do. It's a very personal story, really," says Craig. Walsh offers a more hard-nosed view: "The money men thought: 'It's got Daniel Craig, OK we can sell it,'" he tells me. Craig, when pushed, concedes that celebrity does have its advantages. "I'm lucky enough to have met along the way some incredibly talented and lovely people. And I kind of want to nurture them – or for them to help nurture me. When I was younger the idea of networking was a big luvvy joke, and on a basic level it's about self-interest – there's nothing nice about it at all. But on a more generous level, it really is the sharing of information."

The budget was just £5.5m, so Craig and Walsh called in favours. Scott's Malibu house at the start of the film is decorated with artworks donated by Gary Hume and Sam Taylor-Wood (their friend Jay Jopling is another executive producer on the film). Damien Hirst produced a special piece for them. Fashion designer Anthony Price (art director of the first Roxy album's cover) recreated some of his designs from the 1970s for the film. And if England in the summer of 1976 looks a little improbable, that's because Craig and Walsh chose to shoot on location in South Africa. For the film's beach scenes they wanted a sunny, hyper-real quality. "It was essential we filmed in South Africa, that we chose a place that we could make look like England – Suffolk, Dorset – but not," explains Craig.

Not that their working relationship was perfect. "We did really test something even as two friends working together," Craig admits. "You're screaming down the phone, not because you're particularly angry but because it's a tough process. And it brings out the worst and the best in people. Raising money for a movie, or paying people, you cross those little boundaries that normally you wouldn't with friends."

The pair's friendship also puts pay to rumours that circulated about alleged homophobia after last year's Baftas. Craig was accosted on the red carpet by the gay journalist and Independent columnist Johann Hari, who teased him that he wasn't wearing his swimming trunks. Craig, visibly irritated, called him a "fucking fool". It was swiftly written up in certain parts of the pink press as "verbal abuse" of a gay man on the part of Craig. "He's so not homophobic," insists Walsh. "I'm one of his best friends and I'm as gay as they come. I don't think he ever for a moment considers someone's sexuality when he's talking to them. It's never, ever been an issue between me and Dan."

Following the success of Casino Royale, it's easy to forget the pasting that Craig took from those who thought him a daft choice for Bond. But the tabloids still insist that Craig displays a prickliness with fans. For what it's worth, he seems the same nice, down-to-earth man I met in interviews before his success. If anything, he is warmer now that he has made the decision to co-operate with the press.

For the time being he's secreted in South America shooting for Quantum of Solace. Little is known about the plot except that the film starts an hour after the death of Vesper Lynd, the woman 007 loved and who double-crossed him in Casino Royale. There is also a topical subtext, including a plotline in which the British government and the CIA help to overthrow the existing regime in a Latin American country. But we can expect an even more flawed, more agonised 007 from Craig. He wants Bond to be the best sort of edgy entertainment. It's an open secret that he fought with Casino Royale director Martin Campbell to give the blockbuster an emotional core.

Soon after Quantum of Solace, we will also see Craig in Defiance, a Second World War tale of Jewish-Polish resistance in the freezing-cold Lithuanian forest. "It's an action-adventure movie, but it's not. It's a story about a group of Jews who survived in the forest at Belarus and it touches a great nerve with me because things such as racism and anti-Semitism are still not, sadly, things of the past in Europe." '

While this kind of pronouncement risks sounding obvious, Craig's sincerity is winning. It's a feature of our conversation and also his career. Born in Cheshire in 1968, Craig grew up in Liverpool. He failed the 11-plus but auditioned successfully for the National Youth Theatre and moved to London. As a struggling actor, he waited tables and slept on friends' floors. It was the era when casting directors had an eye for posh boys with floppy fringes yet, in 1988, he was accepted by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He landed his breakthrough role of Geordie in the 1996 state-of-the-nation drama, Our Friends in the North. And the actor has always displayed a raw, robust integrity, whether it's in films as small as Joe Penhall's 2000 drama Some Voices, about a wayward schizophrenic, or as big as Steven Spielberg's Mossad blockbuster Munich and Chris Weitz's recent Philip Pullman adaptation The Golden Compass.

As an old-style socialist, one senses Craig has to bite his tongue at many of the junkets he's invited to these days. Certainly, he's nostalgic for the days of "growing up in the 1970s, coming out of the 1960s, when the world was in turmoil but people were cool about things and we all seemed to be politically savvy, protesting about things. We seem so naive now in comparison. Back then people were less inclined to go, 'What are the repercussions if I do this and that?'" His heroes are old-fashioned newsmen such as The Independent's Robert Fisk.

And with a 15-year-old daughter of his own, Craig is concerned about how little news young people consume. "We have a general malaise. Unfortunately, there are so many media outlets now, what do you focus on? Individuals with a passion are seen to be rare because people don't seem to be interested in that slight craziness that I grew up loving: that eccentricity, the fact that Peter Cook would be on some punk-rock programme. And you'd go: 'What the fuck is he doing there?' But in hindsight it made complete sense because that's what he wanted to do." As with any parent of a teenage child, he worries about the internet. We should be teaching Facebook studies at school, he says. "I genuinely believe it has to be part of education, because if we're going to be this savvy, if we're going to go, 'OK, right, we'll share this with the world,' we have to understand the implications."

For the actor himself, life has inevitably changed since he accepted the role of Bond. His press appearances are now strictly controlled. "Whatever I do I'm damned," he laughs. "I'm hardly hiding away," he adds, gesturing at a men's glossy fashion magazine with himself on the cover. "I've got so much to say, but I'm an actor not a politician. And if I decide to enter into politics, that's something else. But I can't straddle both places and expect to be taken seriously. I'm not trying to remain interesting, I'm genuinely trying to protect privacy, which I think is due to us all. If I suddenly start doing interview after interview, I haven't got a leg to stand on."

Still, Craig admits he can go into pubs and clubs only if in disguise. "I know if I was in Dan's position, I would have behaved a lot worse than he has," his friend Walsh confides. You sense a wistfulness that Craig can't go outdoors without being mobbed by eager male fans (it's the straight men who get most romantic). "He gets a lot of attention. Especially now everyone has a bloody camera phone," Walsh adds.

What of the future? Craig is by far the best actor to play Bond, yet he also knows he mustn't get complacent. After all, it's a role that his predecessors have never managed to quite shake off. So it was perhaps with an eye to the future beyond Bond (he's contracted for one more film after Quantum of Solace) that he took such an active role in producing Flashbacks of a Fool. "For me, one of the most important things about getting this film made was actually learning something. And being an executive producer, what does that mean? It's lending weight, and it's me going and shaking hands with people, but it's also the fact that we came out of it going: 'OK, we've really moved on somewhere here,'" he says, enthused. "Whether the film is a success or not, I want to work with Baillie again. I'm not afraid of opening the door and going: 'OK, let's expose this and see what happens.'"

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