How Daniel Craig's Impulse Purchase Gloves Almost Ruined Skyfall
Warning: Never let an actor choose his own costume.
There's a grand tradition of actors insisting on adding their own tics or bits of dialogue to film scenes based on their impulses and what they think THEIR character would do in certain circumstances. Obviously, that's their prerogative, and the rewards can be huge for their reputation - after all, those fabled Best Ever Improvised Scenes lists are some of the most auspicious you can ever qualify for.
But sometimes you shouldn't listen, if you're a director. Because sometimes, those suggestions can almost cost your movie millions upon millions of pounds, and all because your lead actor went shopping on his afternoon off.
Charlie Lyne - formerly the enfant terrible of movie blogging thanks to acerbic site Ultra Culture (and now a film-maker himself) - has revealed a story that was told to him by a guy who worked on Skyfall at a party. Putting aside the "friend of a friend" nature of the source, it's a rather brilliant little revelation, particularly since it seems to be entirely true.
According to Lyne, Daniel Craig went out on a day off on set and bought himself a nice pair of leather gloves that he insisted James Bond would definitely wear. To his eternal damnation, Sam Mendes agreed and allowed him to wear said gloves for the key scene set in Macau. He even managed to get them onto a publicity shot...
Unfortunately, as pointed out by some lowly editor, the gloves proved problematic when it came to explaining how Bond's gun was coded to his own fingerprints and wouldn't fire in someone else's hands.
Here's the story in full...
You can just imagine the seething rage both of the producers and of the poor guy who had to pain-stakingly paint in Craig's hands in every scene.