We were left shaken and stirred when Daniel Craig ditched 007′s trademark designer suit for a leather jacket and vest combo to show off his instantly iconic dance moves in Belvedere Vodka’s latest ad campaign.
The ad (or rather Daniel’s performance) got the thumbs up from fans the world over when it landed last month, but the James Bond star has since admitted he really wasn’t sure about his hip new look.
In fact, the 54-year-old said he could hear his grandmother telling him he looked like “mutton dressed as lamb” while he was filming the Taika Waititi-directed ad.
“When I did it, I thought of my nana. She was the voice in my head, saying, ‘Mutton dressed as lamb’,” he told the Sunday Times Culture magazine.
“When I read the script, I thought, ‘Hmm, really’? Then I thought, ‘Let’s go with it. I hope people get the gag’.”
He added: “There was no meeting with my agents, [where they said] ‘OK. What are we going to do? An advert. You’re going to dance’. I wish life worked like that, but it doesn’t.”
As James Bond, Daniel was regularly seen sipping a vodka-based Martini, but director Taika knew he didn’t want to go for the obvious angle for the new ad.
“It felt almost lazy to go like, ‘Daniel, can you hold a martini?’” the Oscar-winning filmmaker told GQ. “I was happy to not even have to entertain that very long.”
He added: “There was sort of the fun of playing with [what] people expect, like ‘Oh, we’re going to make some high-class thing in Paris and it’s in black and white, very pretentious, like the beginning of a French noir film’ or something.
“It was just about having fun with the form, and making sure that we never really took any of it too seriously.
“It’s just nice to do something where it’s like, ‘Oh, is this the real Daniel? Maybe this is a different version of Daniel than we’ve ever seen?’...He just was great and he wasn’t cynical about it, and he wasn’t reticent. He just leaned straight in.
“I didn’t know if he could dance or not. It’s risky—what do you do if you find out he can’t dance?” he added. “I mean, luckily he can.”
Watch the full ad above...