Time & Perspective Quote by Daniel Craig

Sexiness, in Daniel Craig's telling, isn’t a body or a costume; it’s a negotiated space. By pointing to the chess game in The Thomas Crown Affair, he’s name-checking a scene where the charge comes from restraint: two people performing control while clearly losing it. Chess becomes a stand-in for flirting with the rules, not breaking them. That’s why Faye Dunaway “comes up a lot” in his mental model: she’s an icon of intelligent glamour, the kind that doesn’t beg for attention because it assumes it.

Craig’s key move is the paradox: “The moment you try to be sexy, then it’s not.” It’s a jab at the machinery of screen seduction - the too-loud signals, the “look at me” choreography that turns desire into a sales pitch. Trying reads as effort; effort reads as insecurity; insecurity kills the fantasy. What works, he argues, is implication: a glance held a beat too long, a smile that could mean yes or could mean you’re being sized up.

The subtext lands squarely in Craig’s own era of franchise filmmaking, where bodies are lit like products and intimacy is often treated as a checkbox between action set pieces. He’s defending an older, riskier cinematic language: sexiness as tension, not exposure; as power dynamics, not anatomy. The comment doubles as an actor’s note, too - the best screen magnetism isn’t performed at the audience. It’s performed at the other person, and the audience just happens to witness it.