An unearthing of secrets using high-tech gadgets, fast getaways on a huge motorcycle and a no-holds barred punch up in a subway followed by a daring escape that involves sliding down the centre of an escalator.
Early action sequences for the latest Bond movie Skyfall?
While these scenes are certainly from a film starring Daniel Craig, he is nowhere near the centre of the most violent action. That is left to a slip of a girl.
After his exertions as the alpha male in the Bond movies and the recent Cowboys and Aliens, Craig was happy to go along with the role reversal in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which sees Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander literally riding to his rescue.
“I really loved it. That’s what was one of the big appeals.
“But it’s also one of the big appeals about the books I think. What’s interesting about that relationship, how he allows it and is quite happy for her to thump people around for him.”
If the name of the film sounds familiar it is because it follows fairly swiftly on the heels of an already successful adaptaion of Stieg Larsson’s best selling Millennium Trilogy – The Girl....With The Dragon Tattoo, Who Played With Fire and Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest.
In those the role of crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist was played by Michael Nyqvist, who has become almost as closely associated with the role as Noomi Rapace has with the part of Lisbeth Salander.
But, used to being the sixth actor to play James Bond, Craig says he did not feel pressured about stepping into what has become something of an iconic role.
“Not when I’m working with people like this,” he says with nods towards the director David Fincher, screenwriter Steve Zaillian and co-stars Mara and Stellan Skarsgard.
“Having the chance to work with material like this, to work with these people, they make my job easy. They know what they’re doing, so it helps.”
He commenced filming shortly after finishing work on Cowboys and Aliens, the western/scif-fi hybrid based on a graphic novel.
Playing a gunslinger who had spent much his life in the saddle, Craig had adopted a lean and leathery look, working off the pounds to look like a suitably hardened man of the prairie and the saloon,
Blomkvist, however, has spent most of his life riding a desk. He is a man of the indoors and the coffee house, pale from being bundled up against harsh Swedish winters or sitting round dinner tables, drinking wine and talking.
He evens wears a fetchingly geekish pair of glasses to underline the fact that Blomkvist is a middle aged man with the spread to match.
“I was very skinny when I started this job,” Craig admits. “David just sent bowls of pasta to my room and bottles of red wine. Which I sat and ate and drank. And I ate the chocolate in the fridge. That was basically it.
“It’s not that I wanted to be a fat journalist, nobody needs to take that personally. It’s just I didn’t want to look like I did in the previous movie, that was all there was to it.”
Once filming had wrapped he had to turn his attention to Bond, and, as anyone who witnessed him walking out of the sea wearing a pair of skimpy blue bathing shorts can attest, 007 does not weigh himself down with extra pounds any more than he does with emotional baggage.
“I wish I had more time (losing and gaining weight). I came straight off the back of shooting Cowboys and Aliens into this. If I had a month I wouldn’t have even had to think about it, I could have just relaxed and eaten what I wanted.
“The problem I had was stopping this and then starting the next one, when I spent 16 weeks trying to lose it again. That’s the hard part. But it’s the job.”
With the exception of Mara, whose role called for her to be androgynously skinny – the fact she could be mistaken for a teenage boy a form of self-protection for a girl who has suffered a life of abuse – the rest of the cast welcomed the extra padding as insulation against the bitter cold of Sweden, where most of the filming took place.
