The James Bond actor has swapped his action-packed life for a new world of fantasy and mystery. Emma Pinch reports

HE’S holstered his Walther PPK, but Bond actor Daniel Craig is gunning for the box office top spot again this Christmas with his new fantasy blockbuster.

Released tomorrow, The Golden Compass marks a change in direction for the Chester-born star of Casino Royale as he enters a new world of talking animals, mystical lands and sinister sorcery.

The film is the first instalment of a trilogy based on the best-selling and multi-layered His Dark Materials series, by British children’s author Philip Pullman.

In it, 39-year-old Craig plays the dashing and mercurial Lord Asriel, a dark horse whose intentions, in the first novel at least, remain mysterious.

Though he has just started rehearsals for the new Bond film, Craig insists he had no qualms about plunging into another recurring role.

“It didn’t bother me at all,” he says. “That sounds like I have some grand plan, but it wasn’t like that. It was a happy accident that it came up.”

The Golden Compass (published in the UK as Northern Lights) hits cinemas tomorrow and is rumoured to be the most expensive movie ever made, with an estimated budget of more than £120m.

Also starring reigning movie queen and Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman, the story really rests on the shoulders of a 13-year-old newcomer called Dakota Blue Richards, who plays Lyra Belacqua, a precocious child who finds herself caught up in a mystery of epic proportions.

Lyra lives in an alternative version of our world and witnesses some shady behaviour by clerical body the Magisterium. She meets her uncle Lord Asriel and befriends then evades the cold and calculating Mrs Coulter (Kidman), before heading north to rescue her friend Roger, who has been kidnapped by dark adult forces.

Making the journey more interesting are the various beasts she encounters along the way. Not only does she enlist the help of a talking armoured bear (voiced by Sir Ian McKel- len), but one of the conceits of the story is that in this universe, every person has their own daemon, which is a physical manifestation of their per- sonality or soul, in animal form. “I was lucky that my daemon is a snow leopard,” laughs Craig, responding to the trickiness of interacting with a void – later to be replaced by a computer-generated image.

“As long as we leave enough space by my side, it’s all fine. Nicole had much more to do, because she had to interact with her daemon (a monkey) a lot more, as did Dakota.

“They had a green blob to hold, to act with, but I kind of lucked out.”

The father-of-one says he revelled in sharing the screen with a raw youngster.

“I get a big kick out of it,” he explains. “You’ve got to work very hard and keep them enthused because it’s a long day and the kids’ energy levels go down. Dakota learned very quickly, though, and I teased her a lot.”

However, working with children did mean the actor had to tone down his language.

To give the son of a sailor turned pub landlord an incentive, a swear box was established on the set so that, for every curse uttered, he had to pay his young co-star a pound.

“It was worth the money, every penny,” he laughs.

“It cost me a lot, but it was good. It became a bit of a joke after a while.

“Sometimes, I’d be on set and I wouldn’t realise I’d sworn until I heard someone shout, ‘That’s another pound!’”

The sheer scale of the Golden Compass project, produced by the company which made the heavyweight Lord of the Rings Tolkien trilogy, saw writer/director Chris Weitz quit before returning again. “I feel tremendous relief,” Chris says now. “Three years of making two movies at once – one with the live actors and another with the computer-generated bears and the animals – really takes its toll on your health.