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I mean, in the name of all that is holy, look at him. Look at his boobs. His biceps. His upper mons pubis. Scariest of all, look at his eyes.
This is the man who whinged endlessly about wanting to stop playing James Bond because the role is so outmoded, repetitive and shallow (at least I assume that’s why). Even in the interview that accompanies the sleazy page three tit pic you see before you Daniel Craig moans that “trying to inhabit a cipher, in a plotless blockbuster, with the world’s eyes upon you, is like living out a very particular anxiety dream”. Whereas posing topless with your pants open for a prozzy’s phonebox calling card is, what, proper work? Like Olivier or Gielgud or something? Or Daniel Day-Lewis?
Is this your plan for being taken more seriously post-Bond, Mr Craig? A life on the cover of Just Seventeen? Or, more likely, Just Seventy-three.
For this is no straightforward topless shot. There is not a shred of dignity here. This is the waxed-chest, thousand-yard-stare and blue twisted steel of Zoolander parody. This is the sort of vapid, puddle-deep, bone-thick vision of masculinity that makes you want to put David Gandy up for a Nobel prize. This is the dropped shoulder and thrown-out hip of fully surrendered trophy totty. This is “Ooh, Mr Weinstein, you are naughty” territory. This is just plain wrong.
In the days since this photograph appeared in every British newspaper, headlines have been asking breathlessly how a man of 52 got a body like this. But I’m not interested in how he got it. What I want to know is why he got it.
Is this your plan for being taken seriously, post-Bond, Mr. Craig?
I know how he got it. He ate nothing but sticks, moss and protein shakes for six months and spent ten hours a day in the gym, then waxed himself, fake-tanned, dehydrated for 36 hours before the shoot then salt-flushed to make his muscles “pop”. Oh, and just before the cameras rolled he banged his head repeatedly against a motorway bridge support to remove any flicker of life from his eyes.
But why did he do it? What is missing from the life of this happily married father-of-two, in late middle age, who commands $100 million a movie, that he felt could be achieved by building himself a great pair of Samantha Foxes and baring them for a magazine? (I note that Dolly Parton has threatened to do the same for Playboy this year, at the age of 108, and would ask the very same question of her, with my hands covering my eyes.)
And why is he holding a telephone? Why is he holding an eight-inch, slightly curved tube of Bakelite in his right hand? And why is he holding it … there? Dangling against his thigh? I mean, I know why, but WHY?
Was it done only to undermine the very basis of manhood and place a physical representation of late middle age in the papers that might make normal older men feel bad in some way? Because it doesn’t make me feel bad, it makes me feel great. I want to run to the mirror and dance naked with joy at not having pissed my life away in a corona-riddled gym doing bicep curls to It’s Raining Men.
Does he think the phone is connected? If so, why isn’t he holding it up to his ear? That’s plain rude. His thumb isn’t on the clicker, so the line is clearly open. Did his wife call him and start nagging so he’s let the receiver drop so that he can’t hear her saying: “And when you’ve unblocked the sink I want you to get that bloody car serviced, and then paint the garden fence, I’m fed up with you spending all day in the gym while the rest of us are out doing an honest job of work, when I think of all the men I could have …”
This is no straightforward topless shot. There is not a shred of dignity here.
Or did he pick up the phone to make a call himself but can’t, at his advanced age, remember who he wanted to talk to? Was he in the middle of getting dressed and then found himself in the hall, holding the phone, and he’s thinking “I know I came out here for a reason … hang on, why am I holding this telephone? Was I going to call grandma? No, wait, grandma died in ’73. Where’s my shirt? I’m cold. Is this a dream? Who’s that man with a camera?”
Or does he perhaps not even know that the thing he is holding is a telephone at all? Is the point that Bond is so old now that he wanders into a room half-dressed and picks up a 50-year-old plastic thing with a stretchy cord and a mouthpiece because it makes him feel secure in some way, but he can’t remember why?
After all, he does look a bit confused. Nothing behind the glazed expression at all. It’s like if you put the real Daniel Craig next to him, we’d all laugh at how crap the waxwork is. And he’s got a moue on him like a 19-year-old stripper on Instagram — “Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?” “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to pout.” It’s just embarrassing. And I’d never noticed how wide his philtrum was, had you? Look at that snot shoot. You could do the Cresta run down that.
And we haven’t even talked about the popped trouser button with the tantalising flash of pube, promising that his 52-year-old shlong is coiled up down there somewhere and has one last trip around the block left in it. Or did he just not remember to do it up after going for his third wee of the night? It’s often the way with men of his age.
Or is it for the same reason as he has those high-waisted jeans on: that really he’s got love handles and a bit of a tum and this is a more forgiving way to go topless than with buttoned jeans that dig in and throw up a muffin top?
“He has not got that look by running on the treadmill a few times a week,” celebrity trainer Dalton Wong told The Times. “It’s an entire lifestyle dedicated to his body.”
Well, you know what, you could take one look at my beer gut, wrinkles, hairy moobs and dilapidated groin region and say exactly the same thing.