Daniel Craig Showtime Series Won’t Interfere With James Bond Return

We’ve known for some time that Daniel Craig was tied to two-season Showtime drama Purity, adding another splash of kerosene to rumors of his leaving behind the role of James Bond. Now that Showtime has officially confirmed the two-season order however, executives don’t believe Purity would force Craig to hang up the tux.

Craig’s involvement in the international series was confirmed back in June, shortly after the 007 actor began circling a role in Logan Lucky, both indications that Craig’s apparent fatigue with James Bond franchise had boiled over. As Deadline reports, however, Showtime Boss David Nevins remarked at the TCA press tour that Purity wouldn’t necessarily interfere with the next Bond film:

It depends when they do the next James Bond movie, but I don’t think it precludes him is the answer. This will largely be completed during the course of 2017, depending how long they’re willing to wait and shoot the next Bond. There might be some breaks somewhere, but [production] will be fairly continuous.

Adapted from Jonathan Franzen’s novel for 20-episodes, the Scott Rudin-produced Purity follows the title character (long for Pip) as “a young American woman who does not know who she is, and Andreas [Craig], a charismatic German provocateur … He heads a South America-based organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world; Pip gets an internship there in search of her identity.”

Says the official synopsis:

Purity is a morally complex story of youthful idealism, extreme loyalty and cold-blooded murder. Franzen’s intricately plotted novel is populated by characters both hungry for the truth and desperate to hide it. From Stasi offspring to Oakland anarchists, Franzen tracks his characters’ landscapes as varied as East Berlin, the Bolivian jungle, East Harlem walk-ups, and the California Redwoods. Purity is at once supremely ambitious in scope and intensely intimate in its treatment of character – a decades-spanning tragicomedy that builds to a contemporary climax.

Todd Field will write, direct and executive produce every episode, set to unfurl over two years on Showtime. Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, Franzen and David Hare will also executive produce, with Haren and Franzen serving as writers.

Craig has yet to make any formal declaration either way, but with Purity production set to begin in 2017, is the writing on the wall?