How Daniel Craig Built Bond's Body for Casino Royale

The video traces why that body was necessary, what training built it, and what happened on set, drawing on statements from his trainer, the stunt team, and Craig himself. It also covers the regrets Craig later expressed, and how busy adults can work that training into their daily lives.

Craig played Bond in five films, from Casino Royale in 2006 through No Time to Die. Casino Royale depicts Bond in his rough early days, having only just earned his license to kill. As Bond himself quips in the film, "I hear double-Os don't live long," and this Bond throws himself, with nothing but his body, into situations where he could die at any moment. According to the speaker, what was called for was a battle-scarred spy, different from the polished Bonds who came before.

The task of building Bond's body fell to trainer Simon Waterson. In a magazine interview, Waterson recalled that the most important thing was for Craig to look like he could do the job. Looking good wasn't enough, he said; it had to be a body that could jump off buildings, vault fences, and scramble up scaffolding.

Here the speaker ties this back to the lats mentioned at the start, since the lats are the main muscles at work when you pull your body up with your arms. This Bond isn't a spy who just smiles in a suit; in the opening Madagascar sequence, he races across construction cranes chasing his target. Unless his body made audiences think "this guy could really do it," the story itself wouldn't hold together—that's the speaker's explanation.

In another interview, Waterson also described the physique for this film as "big, intimidating, and shocking." To the speaker, the thick pecs and bulging deltoids from the opening are exactly those words given form. To silence the criticism from the casting announcement, he needed a body that was convincing the instant it appeared on screen. Craig himself has said he bulked up in a hurry to make Bond look like someone who had just left the military.

The emblem of this is the scene where Bond emerges from the sea. The scene recalls the famous moment in 1962's Dr. No when Ursula Andress's Bond girl rises from the water, and the speaker frames it as Bond's own body now carrying the kind of showcase moment that had previously been given to women.

Waterson is a trainer with a military background who worked on the last two of Pierce Brosnan's Bond films and was with Craig for all five of his. What he cares about, reportedly, is less how a body looks than whether it moves properly: running, climbing, jumping, fighting. The goal is to build a body that can actually be used within the role.

Of the Bond training, Waterson has said he designed programs that varied to suit each role and pushed past the limit as the character demanded. In 2022 he published a book, Intelligent Fitness, laying out his philosophy of getting three things in order: training, recovery, and diet. He has also trained other Hollywood heroes, including Chris Evans and Chris Pratt.

According to Waterson, the training for Casino Royale ran on two tracks.

The first was heavy weight training to build muscle. In an interview the following year, Craig himself recalled doing a lot of weights because he had to bulk up fast. A film magazine reported that for several months he trained five times a week, doing exercises such as pull-ups, squats, barbell curls, and bench presses.

The second was dynamic training for explosive movement. In a later interview, Waterson described one of the fundamentals he teaches Craig: "It's all about explosive movement. Getting up from lying on the floor as quickly and efficiently as possible." Building big muscles while also being able to move them in an instant—the speaker calls this a practical combination for handling action scenes.

For the fight scenes, he received instruction in Krav Maga, the self-defense system developed in Israel. The Bond of the novels is a former military man with a working grounding in jujitsu and boxing, not a master of any single martial art. That, reportedly, is why practical grittiness was called for rather than polished form. As for diet, Craig recalled lifting a lot of weights and eating a high-protein diet.

The body built this way was put to merciless use on set. The bomb-maker Craig chases in the opening Madagascar chase was played by Sébastien Foucan, a leading figure in parkour. The screenwriters are said to have come up with the scene after watching a documentary he appeared in. Craig said he wanted to show himself putting his body on the line leaping from crane to crane, and he performed many of the stunts himself.

Stunt coordinator Gary Powell said at the time of release, "Daniel Craig bleeds. He did everything we asked of him, and more." He said Craig had told him, "Let me do everything you think I can do." Producer Michael G. Wilson also said in a documentary that he had never seen an actor take training so seriously. The speaker sums this up by saying Bond's body was built in the gym and proven on set.

Years later, however, Craig said something surprising about his Casino Royale physique in an interview with a British newspaper: it wasn't very good, he should have done more running, and he got a little too big. Looking back on the body that had been so widely praised, he himself said it "wasn't good."

The speaker speculates that because the role involved so much running, jumping, and leaping, Craig may have wanted a body that could keep moving rather than one that was simply big. Indeed, the content of his training is said to have changed in the later films. The speaker says they feel that this verdict—passed by an actor who saw Bond through five films on the body he started with—holds the answer to how this Bond's body was built.

On Craig's diet during his Bond years, Waterson has said there was no extreme restriction and nothing was cut out entirely. During filming he ate six meals a day, with the priority on never running out of energy.

What the speaker finds interesting is a system reported by a British newspaper for the lead-up to his final film, No Time to Die, in which the menu changed by day of the week. Monday was plant-based, Tuesday fish, Wednesday white meat such as chicken, Thursday vegetarian, and Friday red meat. To recreate this in Japan, the speaker suggests something like a tofu-and-vegetable set meal on Monday, a grilled fish set meal on Tuesday, grilled chicken on Wednesday, a vegetable-packed soup with brown rice on Thursday, and steak on Friday. In the speaker's view, sticking to a set rhythm rather than enduring deprivation is a fittingly Bond-like approach for someone who went the distance across five films.

Finally, the speaker shows how busy adults can adopt this routine. The exercises introduced here are not the speaker's own invention; they are the four Craig is reported to have actually done for Casino Royale: pull-ups, squats, barbell curls, and bench presses.

The speaker points out, however, that the Hollywood approach is a cram-style method for getting results in the few months before filming, and that training five times a week with a personal trainer is itself the job. Keeping up the same frequency while holding down a job would honestly be difficult, they say. So the speaker keeps Craig's exercises as they are, and organizes how many times a week and how many sets to do by level, based on the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) position stand revised in 2026 for the first time in 17 years, along with research papers on strength training.

According to the speaker's explanation, the latest position stand sets out these guidelines: train the major muscle groups at least twice a week; if you want to build muscle size, do around 10 sets per muscle per week; and if you want to build strength, do 2–3 sets per exercise at about 80% of your one-rep max. Since the position stand itself doesn't divide by level, the speaker combined these guidelines with research papers and organized them as follows.

• Beginner: Twice a week, 4 sets per muscle per week. This is the amount presented in a review paper as the minimum for people short on time; choose a weight that brings you close to failure in 6–15 reps.
• Intermediate: In line with the position stand, at least twice a week, around 10 sets per muscle per week.
• Advanced: The stage of increasing volume beyond that. There is also analysis suggesting that the more sets you do, the more readily muscles grow. If you also want to build strength, include days with 2–3 sets at 80% of your max.

The speaker adds that Craig's five sessions a week is more than double the position stand's minimum of twice a week, meaning he was pushing himself that hard in the months before filming.

As a rough guide to your level, for a man weighing 70 kg, a one-rep bench press max of just under 50 kg makes you a beginner, around 65 kg an intermediate, and around 85 kg advanced. This is one benchmark presented by a strength-training log site, and even 85 kg reportedly puts you only around the middle of the site's users.

From here, the speaker offers their own suggestions for substitutions on days you can't make it to the gym. Bench presses can be swapped for push-ups, pull-ups done on a doorway pull-up bar, and squats done with bodyweight. The latest position stand also reportedly recognizes bodyweight and home training as effective.

The other suggestion is the explosive movement of quickly getting up off the floor, which Waterson talked about in interviews for the later films. This too is the speaker's own adaptation, but simply focusing on getting up quickly from a face-down position on the floor between sets should, they say, bring you closer to the thinking behind this Bond's body. Rather than chasing size, maintain a body that can move. The speaker describes this as bringing the answer Craig himself finally arrived at straight into everyday life.

The speaker closes the video with three points: a "body that can do the job" to overturn the criticism, a body proven on set while shedding blood, and the answer Craig himself later came to—"a body that can move matters more than size."