Daniel Craig Once Called Starring in Angelina Jolie’s ‘Tomb Raider’ the ‘Worst Mistake I’ve Made’

Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider was once one of Daniel Craig’s most notable supporting roles before he became James Bond.

But the actor didn’t look too fondly back on the film, especially since he felt it slowed down his career considerably.

Daniel Craig’s original audition for ‘Tomb Raider’ didn’t go too well

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was the first live-action Tomb Raider film based on the popular video game franchise. Angelina Jolie would end up in the starring role, but initially she wasn’t sold on the idea.

“I thought it was the craziest thing I ever heard,” she once said in an interview with Cinema. “I mean, I was flattered, but I thought it was ridiculous. I don’t like video games. My ex husband used to play Tomb Raider. I would walk by him and say, ‘Oh, look at her breasts. ‘”

But her concerns were put to rest when she spoke with Tomb Raider filmmaker Simon West.

“But then I met with the director and he told me it wouldn’t be campy or stupid. I realized it was a real movie with a solid character,” she said.

Daniel Craig would later join the project to round out the movie’s supporting cast. But in the beginning, his audition for the movie didn’t go too well. This was in no small part due to the director experiencing a distracting headache at the time.

“I did the interview, and [director Simon West] had a headache,” Craig once said at a press junket according to Movie Pub. “He was holding this bottle of water and he goes, ‘I don’t think you have the right voice. We’re not gonna get very far with this one.'”

But after the director’s headache cleared, West immediately called Craig back to audition for the part again. Craig proceeded to win the director over.

Daniel Craig once called ‘Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’ the worst mistake he’s made

Over the years, Craig shared that he didn’t have a high opinion about the Tomb Raider movie. Speaking to Groucho Reviews, the James Bond actor explained one of his biggest issues with the film was its script. Or lack thereof.

“On something like Tomb Raider, you’re beholden to the fact that you’re—they didn’t have a script. So that’s as simple as that. You can’t start a film without a script,” he said.

According to Female First, Craig once dived a little further into his unpleasant experience with the project.

“Tomb Raider slowed things down for me. It was the worst mistake I’ve made. But it was also a good lesson,” he said. “The script on that was all over the f****** place, waffling on about eight foot f****** green monkeys or some such b**locks and I could just never get my head around what was supposed to be going on. Angie had it worse, she was in every scene and had to take all the s*** afterwards.”

At the time, the Knives Out actor even regretted agreeing to do the film at altogether.

“But personally I should never have said yes. I felt like a bit of a spare p**** at a wedding throughout. I probably looked like one too,” he quipped.

Angelina Jolie wasn’t satisfied with ‘Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’

Craig wasn’t the only actor who felt Tomb Raider didn’t live up to its potential. The Maleficent star once shared a similar sentiment, finding herself a little disappointed with how it all turned out.

“I wasn’t satisfied with it,” Jolie once said in an interview with Black Film. “Through the making of that film, we were all still trying figure out how things worked, and we were trying to make the video game into a person, but still it was the video game and still she was a video vixen and she wasn’t quite a solid woman with emotions and feelings. Even the way she looked wasn’t to me sexy and real enough. So there were a lot of things, and we couldn’t adjust to everything right.”