Daniel Craig sees a little James Bond in a character who, on the surface, seemed about as far from 007 as he could get.
He first took over the role in 2006 with Casino Royale and stayed with it through 2021’s No Time to Die. Along the way, he appeared in five Bond movies.
During those years, he didn’t take on a ton of other movie roles. One of them was David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Released in 2011, the movie gave Craig a character who seemed pretty far removed from 007. Instead of playing a secret agent traveling the world and chasing villains, Craig played journalist Mikael Blomkvist.
Blomkvist gets pulled into the investigation of a woman who disappeared decades earlier. Not exactly James Bond. Still, Craig thought the two characters had a few things in common.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo gave Daniel Craig a very different role
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Blomkvist is hired to look into the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, a young woman who vanished from her family’s island years earlier. What begins as an old mystery slowly turns into something much darker. Blomkvist eventually works with Lisbeth Salander, played by Rooney Mara, and together they start uncovering things that some people would probably rather leave buried. There aren’t many obvious Bond comparisons there.
Blomkvist doesn’t work for the government. He doesn’t have Bond’s training. And he certainly isn’t walking into every situation with the confidence that he’s going to come out on top. But when we spoke with Daniel Craig around the time the movie was released, he said there were still similarities between the two men.
Daniel Craig saw a little Bond in Blomkvist
Bond and Blomkvist obviously live in completely different worlds, but both have a hard time letting something go once they know there’s more to the story. They keep digging. Blomkvist could probably walk away from the investigation at several points in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but he doesn’t. The more he discovers, the more determined he becomes to find out what really happened.
Bond isn’t all that different in that respect. Give him a question he can’t answer or somebody he doesn’t trust, and he’s usually going to keep pushing until he gets to the bottom of it. Blomkvist just goes about it in a very different way. He doesn’t have the weapons, gadgets or MI6 behind him. He’s a journalist who keeps asking questions and following whatever leads he can find.
For Craig, that was enough to see a connection between the two characters, even if nobody was ever going to mistake Mikael Blomkvist for James Bond.
Click on the video below to hear Daniel Craig talk about the similarities he saw between James Bond and his character in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
A very different stop in Craig’s career
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came out in 2011, right in the middle of Daniel Craig’s run as Bond. He had already made Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall would follow the next year. That made Blomkvist one of the relatively few characters audiences got to see Craig play while he was still closely associated with 007.
And there was no mistaking one role for the other. Blomkvist wasn’t supposed to be the toughest guy in the room. He wasn’t there to save the world. He was trying to solve one mystery, and the further he went, the worse that mystery became. Maybe that’s why the similarities Craig pointed out are interesting. You have to get past everything we normally associate with James Bond before you really notice them.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is currently streaming on Netflix, and it’s available on DVD, Blu-ray and most digital platforms.
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