Daniel Craig Shares Insight Into Pride and Slog of Playing 007

Daniel Craig is coming off a record-setting opening of No Time to Die in the U.K. this past weekend, and about to find out how it does in the U.S. this weekend. The film, which has earned critical raves and stars Rami Malek, Lea Seydoux and Lashana Lynch, is his last role as 007.

He tells ET of playing Bond in five films: “I am very proud of what we have done. I am so lucky to have had this opportunity the last 16 years. What happens in the future, it just feels like it is going to take 15 years to unpack all of this, to figure out what what just happened. Sometimes it was a slog, it has gone like that snaps his fingers.”

Craig shares that he remembers being announced as the next Bond “like it was yesterday,” but still finds it “so impossible” to “put a kind of explanation” on the whole experience.

“I have changed immeasurably since I began this in my professional life, and in my personal life,” he says. “… I try to self-examine a little bit. It's given me a confidence that I didn't have when I started off, this confidence to sort of try and make the best of what you have and make the best movies you can. That is all I have ever tried to do with these films.”

Meanwhile, Lynch, is embracing her new role as the M16 agent who inherits the 007 title while he is in exile. She says: “I come from a working class background, Jamaican background, and me and my family have had conversations over the years of how we are going to put our mark on the world, and what our children are going to feel and relish in, the legacy that we produce for them. Even being casted in a Bond movie was something that was not in my sphere. I am a manifestor, and I have kind of tried to manifest a lot in my career, and this just passed me and I didn't even realize.”