  Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara attend New York premiere of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", Dec. 14, 2011. (HRC/WENN.COM)
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Daniel Craig is the sort of bloke who prefers to make his own phone calls.
That may sound unremarkable, unless you've conducted celeb "phoner" interviews before, which are usually preceded by a call from a publicist heralding the upcoming chat.
"I love that, 'heralding,'" an amused Craig says over the phone in a Canadian-exclusive interview from Sweden (where he's promoting David Fincher's English-language remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which opens across Canada on Tuesday night).
"Because that's what it is, isn't it? 'I have Daniel Craig on the line. Oh, how exciting!'"
Craig has an undeservedly dour image, mainly based on his apparent inability to smile on cue for photographers. But he laughs several times over the course of our interview, vowing to use my standard response to people who object on principle to the very idea of a remake, "Did you read the book in Swedish?"
"I'll remember that. I'm going to use that," he says, chuckling.
But he's particularly jocular about the irony of playing a journalist, a breed with whom he supposedly has a contentious relationship.
As disgraced Swedish journalist/corruption-hunter Mikael Blomkvist, who joins forces with an emotionally scarred computer-hacking young woman named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) to crack a serial-killing case, he's a slightly more rumpled version of the man last seen as James Bond in Quantum of Solace. Did he follow a journalist's regimen?
"I tried. I really did," he says, cheerily. "I drank a bottle of red wine every night, and a big bowl of pasta. And then the mini-bar would get raided for Gummi Bears and chocolate.
"I also smoked a lot on this film, because Blomkvist was smoking. I've smoked on and off for a while. Disgusting habit, but it's part of who Mikael was. I was a smoker by the end." (He has since quit to get back into Bond shape for the new film, Skyfall.)
"I do get this reaction, which is so interesting, people saying, 'You're playing a journalist. Isn't that kind of hypocritical?' It's a tag I've got, because I'm very vocal of the fact that I have a private life (including a recent marriage to actress Rachel Weisz), and that sort of butts up against people's ideas of ownership of my private life.
"But journalism is incredibly important. You see it when it breaks down and free press is abolished. The truth disappears and you get a totalitarian system.
"A free press is essential to a democratic society. I understand that," he says, adding that were he still alive, Dragon Tattoo trilogy author "Stieg Larsson would be front and centre at the moment with his take on the current state of affairs in the world." (There is a subtext in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo about big-moneyed interests corrupting both the media and government).
Craig's mission in the movie, he feels, was to seem normal.
"I'm dealing with a broken man with a big ego. That's the appeal and the pitfall of the character. He's an egotist and he's got himself into trouble, not fact-checking being one of his problems, which is a bad one if you're being sued by a billionaire.
"My main aim was to get him to be as normal as possible. I wasn't trying to break preconceptions of being James Bond and all that, but I was trying to make him normal. When he gets shot at, he runs away, there's no kind of heroism about him. But it doesn't make him less of a man, he's just reacting exactly the way human beings would normally react.
"And then you throw in this fantastic character Salander, who makes the story so great. He's egotistical, he loves women, and he's always brutally honest about everything. Therefore he's kind of a good person to have in your life. That's what Lisbeth kind of sees in him."
We are, in fact, seeing a lot of the non-007 Daniel Craig lately -- in this past summer's Cowboys & Aliens and Steven Spielberg' upcoming The Adventures of Tintin, for example. And we can thank the recent money troubles of MGM for that. The Bond franchise was in limbo for several months until the studio was floated with some new investment.
"It was in hiatus, and we were waiting for that to be sorted out," Craig recalls. "But I can't sit around and wait for them to make a decision that may not come, and I'm going to be stuck not working.
"It gave me an opportunity to do a cowboy movie, which I've always wanted to do, and then this came along, so it worked out very well for me."
We use the delicate word "underperformed" to describe Cowboys & Aliens' box office. "It's so depressing, that word," Craig replies with a chuckle.
"Look, it did pretty good. It underperformed in North America where all the judgment is put, but it did pretty well around the world. I really did get to fulfil a childhood dream. So I got a lot out of it."
Tintin (in which he voices the villain Sakharine) was a sensory deprivation experience that he describes as "kind of fun. It was a great, fun cast, Steven was in a really good mood. I did two weeks two years ago on that film, which is what mo-cap (motion capture) is all about. We had a good time and laughed a lot. You have to laugh when you're wearing a leotard."
But The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was the real hiatus prize. Its smartness "was one of the major attractions, apart from, obviously, David Fincher being involved. I think this movie is a beautiful piece of work. It's an adult drama and I think it's something that, to my mind, hasn't been around for a while.
"Yes, it is a risk in a way. But I'm hoping a lot of people will go and see it. I think they will. It's tough movie watching. It makes you sweat a bit, and I'm really kind of proud to be part of it."
And it's not in 3D, we add.
"No, thank Christ," Craig says.
DANIEL CRAIG ON THE BIG SCREEN
Where you may have seen him first: As John Ballard, the murderous young priest assigned to assassinate the Queen (Cate Blanchett) in Elizabeth.
Where you probably saw him first: Opposite Angelina Jolie as fellow tomb raider/love interest Alex West in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
Where you must see him, if you haven't already: As the unnamed London druglord, trying to get out of the business in Matthew Vaughn's Layer Cake.
Who he reportedly beat for the role of James Bond: Clive Owen, Hugh Jackman, Colin Farrell, Eric Bana, Ewan McGregor.
Why he's a "buff" Connery-type Bond instead of a Roger Moore: "Returning to Bond form took me about 12 weeks, five days a week, hell on earth, all of those wonderful things. You have to get back in the gym as painful as it is. I hanker after Roger's job, I really do. But when I read the Casino Royale script I thought, 'This guy's got to be fit, he's got to be a killer.' I wanted to make him into something very physical."
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