Long before he was James Bond, Daniel Craig stood in a cavernous supermarket on the edge of Reading, wearing a Marmite jumper and handing samples to shoppers who mostly wanted to get to the checkout. It is one of the better entries on the long list of odd jobs British actors take before the work arrives, and in Craig’s case it is the job that earned him his Equity card. Years later, asked by GQ what the biggest misconception about him was, he answered with a question of his own: “That I don’t like Marmite?” This is the story behind that, and the actor it happened to.
Did Daniel Craig really work as “Mr Marmite”?
Yes. As a struggling young actor, Craig took a promotional job for Marmite, spending his shifts in a Marmite jumper and giving out samples of the spread to passing shoppers. He has called it one of the worst jobs he ever had, while allowing there were worse ones, but it mattered for a practical reason: the work earned him his Equity card, the union membership a British actor needed to turn professional. So the man who would become the sixth James Bond owes a small but real debt to a jar of yeast extract.
That last part sounds odd until you know how the union worked back then. Until the late 1980s Equity ran what was called a closed shop: you could not get most acting jobs without a card, and you could not get a card without proof of paid professional work. It was a neat trap for anyone starting out. The way through it was not always the stage. Variety turns, holiday-camp entertaining and contracted promotional work all counted, and standing in a supermarket as a costumed “Mr Marmite” was, in the union’s eyes, a paid performing engagement rather than a day on the tills. That is almost certainly how the job did its real work. Craig has never spelled out the paperwork, only that it got him his card, but the closed shop is why a Marmite jumper could be a back door into the profession.
Craig has remembered it as a “Save-a-Centre” in Reading, and the store he means is almost certainly the SavaCentre at Calcot, on the western edge of the town. SavaCentre was a joint venture between Sainsbury’s and British Home Stores, a small chain of vast, American-style hypermarkets, and the Calcot branch was the biggest of the lot. It opened in September 1981 a few hundred yards from junction 12 of the M4, with 81,000 square feet of sales floor, a staff of 867, and a car park for more than 1,300 cars. In other words, exactly the kind of enormous, strip-lit shed where a brand would set up a sampling table and pay a young actor to stand behind it in a jumper.
Does Daniel Craig actually like Marmite?
He does, and he has gone out of his way to correct the record. In a 2011 interview with GQ, asked to name the biggest misconception the media held about him, Craig replied: “That I don’t like Marmite?” The line was delivered with a straight face and a wink, the joke being that of all the things written about a famous and famously private actor, the one he chose to push back on was a suggestion that he was a Marmite hater. For a brand built on the idea that you are either a lover or a hater, having Bond quietly file himself under “lover” is no small thing.
Who is Daniel Craig?
Daniel Wroughton Craig was born on 2 March 1968 in Chester. His mother was an art teacher and his father served in the Merchant Navy before becoming a pub landlord. After his parents divorced when he was young, Craig moved with his mother and older sister to the Wirral, growing up around Hoylake and attending school on the peninsula. He was drawn to acting early, joined the National Youth Theatre as a teenager in 1984, and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London from 1988 to 1991.
Daniel Craig’s breakthrough roles
Craig spent the 1990s building a reputation as a serious, watchable character actor rather than a star. His breakthrough came on television as Geordie Peacock in the acclaimed BBC drama “Our Friends in the North” in 1996. Film roles followed, including “Elizabeth” in 1998, “Road to Perdition” opposite Tom Hanks in 2002, the British crime film “Layer Cake” in 2004, and Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” in 2005. “Layer Cake” in particular put him on the shortlist of names being discussed for a part that would change everything.
Daniel Craig as James Bond
In 2006 Craig took over as James Bond in “Casino Royale”, a casting that was doubted loudly in advance and vindicated almost as quickly. His Bond was harder and more bruised than the part had been in years, and more human with it. He went on to play the role across five films over fifteen years: “Casino Royale” in 2006, “Quantum of Solace” in 2008, “Skyfall” in 2012, “Spectre” in 2015, and “No Time to Die” in 2021, which brought his run, and his version of the character, to a definitive close.
Daniel Craig after Bond
Rather than coast on Bond, Craig moved straight into one of the most enjoyable second acts in recent film. He plays the drawling detective Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” films, beginning in 2019 and continuing through “Glass Onion” in 2022 and a third mystery after that, a role that let him show a comic lightness Bond never asked for. He has also kept a foot firmly in theatre, playing Iago in “Othello” on Broadway in 2016 and the title role in “Macbeth” in 2022, and took the lead in the 2024 film “Queer”. For an actor who once handed out Marmite samples in a hypermarket off the M4, it is a long way travelled, and he appears to have kept the taste for the spread along the way.
Daniel Craig’s personal life
Craig has been married to the actress Rachel Weisz since 2011, and the couple have largely kept their family life out of public view, which fits a man who has never seemed comfortable with the celebrity side of fame. He has a daughter from his first marriage and a daughter with Weisz. That guardedness is part of why the Marmite line in GQ is so telling: it is one of the few personal preferences he has ever volunteered freely, and he used it to set the record straight on a jar of yeast extract rather than on anything weightier.
Daniel Craig’s notable films and TV at a glance
- Our Friends in the North (1996, television)
- Road to Perdition (2002)
- Layer Cake (2004)
- Munich (2005)
- The James Bond films: Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012), Spectre (2015), No Time to Die (2021)
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
- Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022) as Benoit Blanc
- Queer (2024)
