This is the first Bond of the new millennium. Do you feel like a totally new Bond villain?
This is a Bond film, it's not aspiring to be gritty realism, so it does function in a realm of fantasy. The characters, the villains, are heightened. They are richer than rich, they are more evil than evil, and they have these enormous ambitions, and I think within a Bond framework that works, that's what people want from these movies.
I do think, though, that Bond has to change if it's to survive, it has to keep up with the times, so when the Cold War was around, it operated in a world where that was the case. Now, the Iron Curtain has come down, Bond has to keep up with the times. I think one of the successful things about Bond, and one of the reasons why it survives, is that it feeds on current neuroses in culture, in this case, genetics and North Korea. It takes these things and puts them in a realm that, in a way, is safe.
Your name pops up from time to time as an actor who might be Bond one day. Did that make you hesitate before taking the role of Gustav Graves?
Inevitably one forgoes the glittering prize of Bondhood. If somebody two years ago had said to me, "You're going to be in a Bond film, and you're going to be playing a Bond villain," I would have rolled around in hysterics and thought they were being absurd. After being lucky enough to be offered the part of a Bond villain, I'm not going to be churlish and say, "Well, what about playing Bond?" I grabbed it with both hands and ran. I'm happy, very happy, and whoever does get Bond, I wish them all the best.
Did you take inspiration from any previous Bond villains?
Yes, I have a number of favourites. My top favourite - who is also Lee Tamahori's favourite, is Robert Shaw in "From Russia With Love". Although he wasn't the arch villain, it was one of those stories where you never saw the villain, you just saw the back of his head. Bob Shaw was the face of the villain, really. He was the hired assassin who was after Bond and I thought that he gave a wonderfully controlled performance. It was this controlled aggression that made you deeply nervous of him losing control. I really loved that, and also I love Donald Pleasence in his ones, as he had this really sinister, detached feel to him. What I wanted in this one was a combination of somebody who is arrogant and aggressive, but also, on the other hand, quite unhinged and sinister.
You get to share a scene with Madonna, was that especially daunting?
It was slightly daunting in that it's like moving into the unknown for me. On one level I wasn't daunted by actually doing a scene with her, because I'm an actor by profession and she's an actress by hobby, and so I was like, "Well, this is my job, I'm not going to be intimidated." However, meeting somebody who is an icon was slightly nerve-wracking, but I was very pleased to find out that she was actually very nice and very professional. We had a morning to do her scene, and we did it in the allotted time and it was very pleasant, actually.
Did you have any embarrassing moments during the shoot?
Yeah, the scene where I parachute into Buckingham Palace, my mother-in-law lives quite near there and she got up very early and came along, and I was suspended in the air with this parachute on a crane, hanging there while they set up the shot down below. And she's 200 yards away behind a tree going, "Hello!" And I'm like going, "Please go away!" I'm supposed to be the Bond villain and there's my mother-in-law, but it was actually very sweet of her to make a show.
Do you subscribe to the view that it's better to play a villain than a hero?
I think in the Bond movie there's more latitude for villains, because Pierce has already established himself as Bond, and once you're established as Bond you don't have much room to manoeuvre. The only room you have is what situation you are put in as that character, whereas playing a villain you have carte blanche, you can go wherever you want with it. I don't want to spend the rest of my career playing baddies, but it was a lot of fun in this case.
Did you get any injuries filming the sword fight?
I was very lucky, I came off pretty unscathed. We started training a month prior to shooting, and then we were supposed to film the sequence three months into the film but Pierce did his knee in, so by the time we actually got to the scene there'd been six months of training. All of us were just desperate to get it out of the way, but we were all highly trained by this point. If they'd done it three months into it, we probably would have damaged each other, but by the time they actually came to film it, we were so practised at it that it was a very safe fight. It was very dangerous because we had to really go for each other, so you had to trust that your opponent gets their sword in the way, otherwise I could have wrecked Pierce's face, or he could have wrecked mine, and I really wouldn't want to do that.
