John Maybury, who directed Craig in Love Is the Devil and The Jacket, suspects that Craig's newfound celebrity will have a minimal effect on his work. “Of course Bond will give him a career upgrade,” says Maybury, “but I do not doubt that he would come back to a little director like me. At the end of the day Daniel follows the work, and he'll want to stay in touch with theater and small cinema. I'm sure Bond is going to give him the confidence to take even greater risks.”
Speaking only one week after the film was released, Craig says he has yet to see stacks of brilliant film scripts piling up at his feet. “You have to look for them,” he says. “Nothing changes on that level.” Still, he says it's a thrilling period in his life. “I haven't stopped working for a while, but I'm actually having a pretty good time with everything. It's quite remarkable, really.”
Kidman's state of mind isn't quite as easy to gauge. When her costar leaves the room to go pick up his daughter, she visibly deflates, and her humor takes on a dark edge. “A-list? Wow!” she says, responding to a question about her status in cinema land. “Is that the same as A-class drugs? Sorry,” she quickly adds with a laugh. For the remainder of the interview she seems wistful and somewhat melancholy. Her recent personal travails are well known to anyone who's walked past a newsstand lately: In October Urban began a stint in rehab for alcohol abuse. Asked whether she's happy in her new marriage, Kidman pauses and says, “Um, to be honest…yeah. But I don't talk about my marriage or my family that much.” She adds, “Keith is a wonderful man.” His base in Nashville, she says, has become a real home for her too. “It's our haven, and obviously my priority is my life in Tennessee now.”
On the career front, in any case, the actress is feeling wholly re-energized. Last spring, she says, her passion for acting returned after a dry spell. The catalyst was a still-untitled film directed by Noah Baumbach costarring Jennifer Jason Leigh; it's a family drama in which the two play sisters. “It came along at a time in my life where I really needed to fall in love with acting again,” Kidman says. “I go through stages where I'm not able to act because I don't have anything to say. I don't have anything inside me. You just don't have the urge—it's almost a primal urge.”
Kidman is also jazzed about an upcoming film by frequent collaborator Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!), set in pre—World War II Australia. “I deeply, deeply love both Baz and Catherine Martin, his wife,” she says. “It's beautiful to be rediscovered by a director time and time again as you change and morph and continue to grow, to have somebody who kind of knows your core and can help to bring things out of you that you don't expect.” Kidman is known for her seriousness on the set, and Weitz says it never once flagged during The Golden Compass: “Even when she was clutching the Day-Glo green beanbag—which in the film will be a golden monkey—she was intense. There's a real veracity, a real humanity to her acting.”
