“Bond cries in ‘Skyfall.’ No one remarks on that,” Rachel Weisz told me over breakfast in the East Village of Manhattan. “I think it’s a huge scene, isn’t it?” I couldn’t help but agree with Weisz, who deserves an Oscar nomination for her role as an unfaithful wife in “The Deep Blue Sea” — but couldn’t have been more faithful in her reading of her husband Daniel Craig’s hit “Skyfall.” She was referring to the climactic scene when Bond holds an injured M, played by Judi Dench, in his arms in a Scottish church.
We had taken a detour in our discussion of Weisz’s career to discuss my column about how M comes out from behind the desk and has a story arc in “Skyfall.” And she develops as both a mother figure for Bond, and his current archenemy Silva (Javier Bardem). The rogue agent’s motivation originates in his sense that M threw him under the bus years before. In that sense, Silva and Bond are brothers in spy with M as their mutual Mum.
“Really,” Weisz said, “I never thought of that: M is for Mother. But I remember that Silva says, ‘Mummy’s been very bad.’” And, then, later, when Bond drives M to his childhood home, and she’s injured, he carries her in his arms. And that’s when, according to Weisz, Bond cries. “It’s rather interesting,” Weisz said. “You should check it out. For me, it’s just remarkable. Somebody said to me, oh, no, he’s sweating.
He’s sweating? Okay, I mean, I’ll let people see whatever they want to see.” Craig’s wife was not the only one to notice the tears of a spy. Under the headline “007 – License to Cry” the semi-official paper of the Vatican, “L’Osservatore Romano,” noted that the current Bond is “”more human, capable of being moved and of crying: in a word, more real.”