According to Bill Maher, Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond made the character too soft and insufficiently manly - both objectively wrong critiques. Over the years, the depiction of suave super-spy James Bond has changed to reflect the cultural environment of each new 007 movie’s production. 90s comedian Bill Maher recently claimed that this has resulted in Daniel Craig’s James Bond being a uniquely sensitive, effeminate version of Bond, a verifiably inaccurate claim.
In an interview with TikTok personality Hannah Stocking, Maher claimed that Craig’s Bond was softer than his franchise predecessors. As the search for the perfect Bond 26 007 heats up, retrospectives on the Craig era have become plentiful as commentators reconsider the actor’s contributions to the James Bond franchise and how they reshaped the iconic character. A cursory glance over these retrospectives proves that Maher is wrong and, if anything, Craig’s version of James Bond was too tough to be fun.
On the Club Random podcast, Bill Maher argued that Craig’s iteration of Bond softened the character and compromised his masculinity, saying: “This was back when James Bond was allowed to like, like, **** hot chicks. You know, now they really *****-fied him. It’s so pathetic. He literally takes his girlfriend and her daughter on his mission to save the world. He practically stops off at Target to buy tampons on the way to the underground lair.” As anyone who has seen No Time To Die can attest, Bond’s battle with Safin means that he does not take his girlfriend and daughter on a mission. Instead, Bond takes measures to avoid them accompanying him, only for the movie’s villain to kidnap them. Furthermore, Craig’s iteration of James Bond beds as many women as his predecessors, kills more people than his predecessors, and does so in a brutal, humorless fashion that makes him arguably the most stereotypically masculine 007 in the franchise.
Daniel Craig’s Bond Is The Franchise’s Toughest (To A Fault)
Bill Maher is objectively incorrect in his claim that Craig’s James Bond slept with fewer women than earlier versions of the character. Craig’s 007 slept with two women per movie on average, the same amount as Dalton’s 007 and almost as many as Brosnan’s Bond. Not only was Craig’s Bond a frequently-betrayed ladykiller like his predecessors, but the issue that Maher has with his misremembered version of the Madeline Swann/Mathilde plot also stems from the Craig era’s approach to continuity and canon rather than shifting cultural attitudes toward masculinity. The Craig movies told a linear story that progressed from movie to movie, meaning that it made sense for this new Bond to end up with a long-term love interest.
The franchise experimented with this approach as early as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, wherein Bond got married and tragically lost his wife, making Maher’s outrage factually wrong on another basic bit of Bond history. Moreover, however, Bill Maher misunderstood the reason that James Bond became a brooding, sensitive spy who cries, blaming the “woke world we live in”. In reality, where Goldeneye’s goofy Brosnan Bond was a perfect fit for the post-ironic 90s, Craig’s tortured 007 was an obvious reaction to the paranoia, angst, and anguish found in post-9/11 spy cinema. Craig’s grittier, darker version of James Bond was a result of audiences no longer wanting to watch goofy, campy escapism after the historic event and the subsequent climate of global instability, resulting in 007 movies that took the character more seriously to keep viewers invested.