Even before his Bond tenure was over, Daniel Craig had lucked into another franchise. With Knives Out, he got to play amateur sleuth Benoit Blanc. It’s a much more relaxed gig than 007. He gets to sit in cool chairs, solve some murders, do his best Foghorn Leghorn (again). For the first sequel, the forthcoming Glass Onion, he even got to reunite with a fellow Bond alum: Dave Bautista, who played a heavy in Spectre. That allowed Bautista to see two very different sides of the English actor.
“He was really put through it on Bond,” Bautista told Entertainment Weekly. “You could feel that he was under a lot of pressure. He didn’t seem like the happiest person on Bond, but on Glass Onion, it was the complete opposite.”
On the Knives Out sequel, Bautista said Craig “was just so much fun, and he was always smiling and happy and interacted a lot more. On Spectre, there wasn’t a whole lot of interaction with the whole cast. But Glass Onion was the complete opposite. We were always together. So I got to know him better as a person and actually see him do his thing.”
It blew Bautista’s mind seeing Craig’s range. “It’s really a weird thing when you watch someone transform from Bond to Benoit Blanc,” he said. “It’s amazing because I’m always in awe of people who can transform themselves like that. This is why I wanted to be an actor, because I wanted to be that guy. As odd as it sounds — because I look like a f*cking gorilla — I wanted to be a chameleon.”
Then again, Bautista is a chameleon. He can play the hilariously thick Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy. In Spectre, he’s a menace. In Glass Onion, he’s a YouTuber and Men’s Rights Activist. That’s three roles, all different. Not many other wrestlers-turned-actors have such range, other than Dwayne Johnson and John Cena, of course.
(Via EW)