So it’s not entirely an intermarriage. Daniel Craig deserves a little tribal credit for his portrayal of WWII resistance fighter Tuvia Bielski in the 2008 film “Defiance”, not to mention his portrayal of a Mossad agent in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich”.
Actress Rachel Weisz became Daniel Craig’s permanent Bond girl when the two wed last Wednesday in New York at a very, very under-the-radar ceremony (Were they hiding from her ex-“Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky?). The two tied the knot after a swift six-month romance; Weisz and Aronofsky only announced the end of their 9-year relationship last February. According to reports, Weisz’s 5-year-old son Henry Chance Aronofsky attended the small ceremony, as did Craig’s 18-year-old daughter, Ella. The newlyweds will play husband and wife in “Dream House” set for a fall release.
Craig talked his impressions of Jewish family after he met members of the Bielski clan:
Before filming Craig and the cast did get the chance to meet members of the Bielski family. “We sat and we drank and we talked and we had a conversation and we didn’t talk much about Tuvia, but we sort of talked about… I just wanted to get a feel for them, really,” said Craig. “They were just sort of incredibly forward people, really energetic and really full of life and a proper family. They’re like families are, sitting there and shouting at each other. Why whisper when you can scream? They’re kind of like all families are and they’re full of life. I mean, both Liev and I said, ‘These guys are kind of scary guys.’ They were like, ‘Hey! Come on!’ I can imagine that that’s how their parents were, their father was.”
Of the Jewish resistance during the war, he said:
“I knew about it a little bit. I knew that there was a Jewish resistance, but the only thing that I’ve read about it is that it was wiped out mercilessly,” explained Craig. “It makes complete sense. Of course they did. The fact that nobody did would’ve been totally strange, but there were major pockets of resistance everywhere. People did fight. The fact is that there was really nowhere to run. The situation here is that the resistance happened within places like this where there was a forest, where people could get away from them. The local population was in cahoots. Unless you could get on a boat and get out of Europe, you were absolutely stuck. This was an incredibly well organized exercise by the Germans. I mean, they did it really efficiently – as we all know. I think that our knowledge of the 2nd World War is based on, and so it should be, what the result of The Holocaust was. Those are the images and the knowledge that we have of that period as we should, and we should be reminded of it as often as we possibly can.”
Weisz is outspokenly Jewish. She has talked about the fact that her Hungarian-born father, an inventor, fled to England to escape the Nazis and in 2001, gave an incredibly insightful interview to Blackbook Magazine about being Jewish in Hollywood (more specifically, about being a Jewish woman in Hollywood). It’s one of my favorite, go-to pieces about perceptions of Jewish women in Hollywood and I find myself referring to Weisz’s comments again and again. You can read it here.
Mazel tov to the new couple.
