NEW YORK

When Daniel Craig first got the gig, he felt like something had gone amiss. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he told the producers. But Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson insisted. No, he was the one. He was James Bond.

Craig, then a rising performer but far from the expected choice, never had any ambitions to play James Bond. He had assumed he was being strung along as part of a massive casting machine, one of dozens of actors screen tested. “Once I did find out, I was incredibly flattered and deeply confused,” Craig recalled in an interview. “I just felt like I wasn’t the right person.”

Fifteen years and five films later, Craig’s tenure as 007 is coming to a close. “No Time to Die,” which opens in the U.S. on Friday after a 16-month delay due to the pandemic, is the last hurrah in Craig’s celebrated Bond era, a stewardship that saw Craig remake and emotionally deepen the once retrograde superspy — with more than $3 billion in box office along the way. Once derisively labeled “Blond Bond,” Craig turned out to be a smash success.

“It paid off in spades,” said Broccoli. “He’s truly remarkable. He’s reinvented it for the 21st century. He explored the inner-life of Bond.” But would Craig have ever gone through with it had he known what he was in for?

“If I had known more, I don’t think I would have been able to do it. The less information I had back then, the better,” said Craig, speaking by Zoom from New York. “The rest of it, the weight of it, how huge it all really is — I didn’t know. I didn’t really understand.”

He pauses. “I don’t suppose I really understand it now, either,” Craig added. “I pretend to understand. That’s what getting older is all about. I pretend better than I did back then.”

“No Time to Die,” directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, is, with certainty, Craig’s final turn in the tux. But it’s also a culmination of where Craig has been driving Bond. His 007 is a character, not an icon, capable of grief and regret, and far from bulletproof. That evolution takes center stage in “No Time to Die.”

“I always just felt: How do these things affect him? Within a Bond world. Not in, like, a Hamlet way. But in a Bond world,” says Craig, who won’t play Hamlet but Macbeth — a play about the perils of ambition — on Broadway next year.