All hail the Smoking Brit

Shane Watson on a new heart-throb: a cross between a navvy and a Russian ballet dancer

Daniel Craig. If you don’t know the name, then you will very soon. Last week his latest film, Layer Cake, opened to some rave reviews; in November, he stars in the screen version of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love; and he’s signed up for one of Steven Spielberg’s next movies. You could reasonably say that he’s in the same place as Ralph Fiennes was circa Schindler’s List, only we’re not just talking about a talent getting the recognition it deserves.

Well, some are. But women are more interested in the other stuff: the swimming-pool blue eyes, the boxer’s nose, the tight, tattooed body that reminds you of a cross between a navvy and a Russian ballet dancer. Kate Moss, as ever ahead of the game, was his girlfriend for a while earlier this year and nobody questioned why she’d gone for a 35-year-old thespian with greying stubble. Never mind the Next Big Thing, this thing is rarer than a cup of tea in the desert, and it’s called the Smoking Brit.

If you analyse what it is that sets the Smoking Brit apart from all the cute actors out there, it boils down to a raw, honest masculinity that can’t be compromised by designer suits or peaky hairstyles. (Think Clive Owen, for one.) These guys are sexy in a way that’s rougher and more dangerous than mainstream Hollywood pin-ups, but, crucially, they are sensitive and grown-up too. And, unlike the Orlando Blooms and Johnny Depps, they do it for females from 17 to 70. Take The Mother, in which Craig played a dishy builder who gets off with a vulnerable and dowdy grandmother. You’d be very hard-pressed to think of an actor who could have played the sex interest with the same tenderness and compassion and sheer horniness. In fact, when you watch Craig on screen, you cannot believe that we’ve allowed ourselves to be palmed off with shallow, bleach-toothed, airbrushed A-list sissies for as long as we have.