Daniel Craig Is In Star Wars, See Who He Played
Daniel Craig finally came right out and asked for a part in the movie.
This article is more than 2 years old
Daniel Craig has been incredibly busy over the past 14 years playing the secret agent James Bond in a slew of the franchise’s movies. Fans may or may not be aware that he held a role in another fan-favorite franchise. While his face was never shown, he does have important and memorable dialogue, making him an important part of the story.
The scene in question sees Daniel Craig’s evil lackey get the Jedi mind control treatment via Rey (Daisy Ridley). While she’s imprisoned and awaiting the arrival of Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), Rey practices her newly honed skills on an unnamed Stormtrooper in order to be freed from her restraints. At first, the tactic doesn’t seem to be working with the trooper commenting that he’ll tighten the ropes, but Rey is eventually able to mind control her way out of the sticky situation.
Before knowing that it was Daniel Craig reading the lines of the Stormtrooper, it was a hard-to-guess cameo. Only longtime fans of Craig’s work could pick out his smooth British accent under the iconic white helmet, but once they did, the rumor mill began to churn. To keep the secret within the confines of production, Craig was never credited with the role, something that wouldn’t hold back sleuths from theorizing about the Knives Out actor’s part in the then newest installment of the franchise.
While his casting was actually only a long-running rumor and speculation for a long period of time, the actor finally made the big reveal during a 2021 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that he did in fact appear in Star Wars: The Force Awakens as a Stormtrooper. During his sit down with Stephen Colbert, the actor laughed and joked that to land the role of one of the Empire’s evil baddies, he had to sleep with the film’s director J.J. Abrams, before getting serious about how he nabbed the cameo.
As to how he actually stepped into the glistening white uniform and picked up a blaster, Daniel Craig revealed that it was all about his role as the womanizing James Bond. As he explains it, both the Star Wars and James Bond productions film at Pinewood Studios in England. The stars truly aligned as the latest Bond film, Spectre, was gearing up to roll cameras following The Force Awakens. It was there that he struck up a conversation with the second assistant director, Ben Dixon, who worked on both the Bond movies and the Star Wars flicks. After beating around the bush a bit, inquiring how shooting for Abrams’ movie was going, Daniel Craig finally came right out and asked for a part in the movie. When Dixon brought Craig’s pitch to the director, the actor was a shoo-in for the job. Dixon soon approached Craig to ask him if he’d like to do a Stormtrooper scene later that week and, giddy with excitement, Craig obliged and the rest is history.
So there you have it, the story of how James Bond became a Stormtrooper for one day! And while we may never see Daniel Craig in another Star Wars film, we’ll never watch that small scene the same way again. After denying it for years, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief to know that we weren’t going insane when we thought that we heard Craig’s voice in the iconic film.
