Daniel Craig Shimmies in Steamy Vodka Ad Directed by Taika Waititi

Samantha Bergeson
·2 min read
5

Daniel Craig prefers his hips shaken, not stirred.

Former James Bond star Craig plays “himself” in a new commercial for Belvedere Vodka, directed by Academy Award winner Taika Waititi. Craig shimmies, shakes, and shows off his killer dance moves, putting Hugh Grant’s iconic “Love Actually” dance sequence (almost) to shame.

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Set at the Cheval Blanc Paris hotel, the ad begins in black and white before tracking Craig walking through the hotel lobby and slowly undressing down to a sleeveless muscle tee. Craig moves to Rita Ora and Giggs’ song, thrusting his hips at the hotel pool, in an elevator, and finally, in his own hotel room where he seamlessly pops the top off a Belvedere bottle.

Waititi, also starring as a caricature of himself, yells cut and tells Craig, “Let’s go again, just be yourself.”

The meta commercial features choreography by JaQuel Knight and finishes with a blooper reel showing “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” actor Craig cracking jokes alongside Waititi. To note, “Thor: Love and Thunder” helmer Waititi and his wife Ora are set to co-host the MTV EMAs November 13.

Craig’s “Glass Onion” co-star Dave Bautista recently revealed that Craig “didn’t seem like the happiest person” when playing Bond in “Spectre,” in which Bautista also starred. “You could feel that he was under a lot of pressure,” Bautista said, noting that post-Bond stint, Craig is a whole new man.

“On ‘Glass Onion,’ it was the complete opposite,” Bautista said. “He was just so much fun, and he was always smiling and happy and interacted a lot more. On ‘Spectre,’ there wasn’t a whole lot of interaction with the whole cast. But ‘Glass Onion’ was the complete opposite. We were always together. So I got to know him better as a person and actually see him do his thing.”

With Bond, Craig reflected on his 16-year tenure, calling his second Bond film “Quantum of Solace” a “shitshow.”

“I would sort of yearn [for] the person I was when I did ‘Casino.’ Too much knowledge sometimes is not a good thing,” Craig said in 2021. “I was sort of in the dark about a lot of things, about how things worked, the mechanics of it, how the world really viewed Bond — all of those things. I just didn’t understand them. Then I started to understand them, the weight of it sort of bore down.”

In contrast, Craig added that he is willing to continue playing campy “Knives Out” detective Benoit Blanc “as long as we’re having fun and [writer/director] Rian [Johnson] is up for it,” sharing, “What a wonderful thing to be able to do. I should be so lucky.”

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