Suspected fake Daniel Craig interview gets pulled by publisher, but questions remain
11-Mar-2019 • No Time To Die
When a new 'exclusive' interview with Daniel Craig on the set of Bond 25 was published by Beyond Magazine a couple of days ago, it was immediately met with skepticism from long-term fans. Why would Daniel Craig give an interview at the start of filming to a relatively unknown magazine before the official press conference? Hang on a minute! Filming hasn't stated either as the interview claimed! And why wouldn't Craig comment on anything contemporary? Why do all the quotes seem to be timeless?... It was all a bit fishy.
Confronted by questions like these, the magazine pulled the piece offline today. But like bureaucracy, the Internet leaves an indelible slime trail and you can read the offending piece here thanks to the Internet Archive.
Some rudimentary Googling of some of Daniel Craig's quotes in the 'interview' throw up some inconvenient similarities with past (real) interviews:
- What it was like imaging being James Bond as a child seems to be pulled directly from a piece syndicated in the Los Angeles Times on 30th Dec 2011.
- His joke about doing 'Gay Bikers on Acid' came from Entertainment Weekly in 2006.
... And that was just the above-the-fold quotes from the supposed interview. Fans will no doubt be able to track down further similarities with other past interviews.
The March/April print edition has already apparently shipped with the offending article included and mentioned on the cover.
Beyond Magazine issued the following statement to Bond fan @JackLugo1 via Twitter (kindly reproduced here):
"As a small publishing company, we often buy in syndicated interviews. This was one of those occurrences. Given the response on Twitter, we have taken the decision to delete the article until we can get some clarity over the piece. We would never intend to mislead our readers or the many James Bond fans and the original piece was published with the best of intentions."
That may be the case (despite the syndicated interview not having been syndicated anywhere else), but there is one final wrinkle. Beyond Magazine claim the interview was bought-in (i.e. written out of house and sold to them), but the byline given on the interview was to Sarah Freeman. According to her Twitter account, Sarah Freeman is 'Group editor at Beyond Publishing.'
