007 helps hold off my mid-life crisis, says Daniel Craig

Daniel Craig hopes he will stave off a mid-life crisis by acting out his fantasies playing the famous 007 spy, reports the Daily Record.

While many turning 40, like the Brit actor did last year, try to stem their fading youth with fast cars, young, pretty girls or new threads, Daniel's acting it all out rather than going through it for real.

Before jetting off to enjoy a New Year break with his fiancee Satsuki Mitchell, 29, in the Caribbean island of St Barts, he told the Razz the "big four-oh" birthday in March passed in a blur - because he was hungover.

Flashing those ice blue eyes, he grinned: "I hope I'm not going to have a mid-life crisis.

"I mean I'm having a mid-life crisis as they go, I'm driving around in an Aston Martin and wearing sharp suits and sort of going around with beautiful girls.

"I'm acting my mid-life crisis out on movies."

Daniel, who came second to Hugh Jackman as People magazine's sexiest Man Alive list of 2008, added: "Turning 40 meant less to me than I thought it would.

"I had a good party and enjoyed it. I woke up on my 40th birthday with a hangover. It wasn't a pretty sight."

Being Bond has certainly given him a lifestyle and career that the never thought he'd achieve when he began working as an actor professionally at 21.

If he'd been looking ahead to his 40-yearold self, he claims all he'd have been hoping for would be having regular work.

He said: "I just wanted to make a living out of it. You know, pay the rent, and enjoy it.

"But the idea of making lots of money and being this successful didn't cross my mind."

Luckily he is now a millionaire and can have breaks in the Caribbean rather than a caravan. His well-earned rest comes after four years of back-to-back work.

But the break wasn't planned, he was actually told he had to take four months off to recover from a shoulder injury.

As recent pictures of him on the beach and dancing in a club have shown, he's also out of the sling which marred the premiere in October of Quantum Of Solace - Bond in a sling just didn't seem right.

Daniel admits the enforced time off has left him feeling down.

He said: "Eventually when I'm not working I get miserable, very miserable.

"But I haven't stopped really, there was the first James Bond film then I did two other movies, then Defiance and then this James Bond. The last four years have been fairly full on.

"I've been forced to do it this time, I injured my shoulder on the last movie and had some surgery, so I can't work till later this month. I'm kind of out of the game."

The lay-off has allowed him to catch up with friends and family, although he won't talk about his teenage daughter Ella by former wife Scots actress Fiona Loudon.

It's because of London-based Ella that he refuses to move to Los Angeles.

All he will say about being a dad is he hopes he's a "good one", adding: "I don't really want to talk about it. I want to protect her."

The notoriously private star also struggles to come up with a New Year's resolution, finally saying: "Well, just try and get it right, that's all."

While 2008 saw Bond's Quantum of Solace rank as the seventh highest grossing film of the year, Daniel starts 2009 with another of his non-007 movies.

He is determined he won't be typecast like previous Bonds Pierce Brosnan, Sean Connery or Roger Moore, who struggled to do work outside Bond while in the role.

SINCE 2005,when he was confirmed as the sixth actor to play the superspy,he's made sure of doing other projects.

He played a Jewish assassin in Steve Spielberg's Munich, starred alongside Nicole Kidmanin sci-fi thriller The Invasion and in fantasy epic The Golden Compass before becoming star and producer in Flashbacks Of A Fool, playing a faded Hollywood star.

Next week the Chester-born actor is back in another non-Bond movie, Defiance - based on a true World War II story about Jewishanti-Nazi resistance.

He is also set to play the Devil in I, Lucifer later in the year.

Making non-Bond movies is hugely important for him and he certainly won't be sitting back waiting for the next 007 movie to be announced.

He said: "It's very important for me to get involved with projects that excite me, keep me excited and inspire me. But I'm not trying to plan it out in any way. There's no conscious decision to go, 'OK, I've got Bond now, I must do this'. It's like 'I'm doing Bond, and oh, this is happening'. I'm trying to keep it as open as possible.

"I've been given this huge opportunity with James Bond to make movies, which not many people get the chance to do and I'm getting a huge kick out of that.

"Because there's nothing quite like them, they're rare movies to make."

Bond won't be back this year, however, and while Daniel's signed up to do at least five Bonds in total - his third won't be a rumoured trilogy of films following on from Casino Royale and the revenge of his love Vesper's death in Quantum Of Solace.

Of the supposed trilogy he laughs: "I'm done with that story.

"I want to lie on a beach for the first half hour of the next movie, drinking a cocktail. I don't know what we're going to do with the next one.

"I know we've finished this story as far as I'm concerned and we've got a great set of bad guys.

"There's an organisation that we can use whenever we want to use it. The relationship between Bond and M is secure and Felix is secure.

"We can try to find out where Moneypenny came from and where Qcomes from. Let's do all that and have some fun with it."

Fun isn't exactly a word you could use to describe his latest film Defiance, which is out next Friday.

He plays Tuvia, one of three Russian Jewish brothers who escape from the Nazis' persecution in 1941 and decide to fight back.

Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell star as the other two brothers, Zus and Asael.

The Bond star admits he found having to speak Russian the hardest part of making the film.

He said: "I left school at 16 and I can't conjugate a verb in any language, even English. So Russian, I just did it phonetically.

"But it was very difficult."

He also doesn't see Defiance as any relation to his previous film Munich - about a Jewish assassination group avenging the deaths of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Laughing, he said: "I don't put my work into a sort of DVD collection, my blue period here or my Jewish period here.

"Genuinely, and I know this might sound kind of naive, but when I read this script, the last thing on my mind was Munich."

And with that Daniel was off, knowing he had a Hogmanay trip to the Caribbean but, like so many of us, worried about what 2009 could bring.

He is concerned that the economic woes won't only hit cinema pockets as we stay at home for our entertainment, but the movie making process.

He added: "Everybody's in trouble.

"There's going to be a cash shortage soon, because the whole point is that the movie industry, like every industry, is built upon how much money they can borrow.

"So if people stop sending them money, it's going to dry up.

"I don't know what the answer is. I know there's going to be a lot of job losses and it's going to be really tricky."

It seems even Bond may feel the credit crunch.

Defiance is out on Friday, January 9.

'When I'm not working I get miserable, very miserable. But I haven't stopped really, the last four years have been fairly full on...'

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