Daniel Craig can pinpoint exactly the moment his world changed. He was sitting in a hotel room in Switzerland when the producer Barbara Broccoli – the keeper of the James Bond flame who had selected Craig to become the new, postmodern 007 amid a storm of scepticism – rang with the news that the box office for Casino Royale was looking good. Very good.

“It was surreal,” he recalls. “Just surreal. The numbers kept going up and up and up and it was like, ‘That’s it! We’ve done it.’” Those numbers did in fact keep soaring, to nearly $600 million (£300 million), making it the most profitable Bond film to date. Add to that a host of international reviews that hailed his performance as a triumph, and you certainly have a reason to celebrate.

Suggest that he might have uncorked a bottle of vintage champagne, perhaps, and his face – the one that looks like it was hewn out of a chunk of rock – creases up into a smile and those piercing pale-blue eyes light up as if they’re powered by halogen.

“You’re joking, aren’t you! Champagne? No way. I had a couple of very large vodka martinis. I went to the bar and it was like, ‘Three please! Shaken, stirred or however you want to serve them.’”

As he knocked back Bond’s favourite tipple, Craig could certainly be forgiven for flipping a two-fingered salute in the general direction of the doubters who said that he was the wrong man for the job. “Yes, when it came out and people liked it, believe me, there was no one happier,” he says. “But I wasn’t going to say, ‘F*** you.’ Because there was no need.”

Craig now has the kind of career that few achieve – he’s a box-office star with street cred, and there aren’t many of those around. From Bond he went straight on to film The Golden Compass, the first part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, in which he plays the rugged Lord Asriel, equal parts explorer and scientist.

The Golden Compass, with a budget rumoured to be $150 million (£72 million) or more, will open next month to a fanfare of publicity and could even outdo Bond in takings. If it’s a success, then Pullman’s two other books will be filmed, and Craig will find himself starring in two of cinema’s biggest franchises. “I know,” he groans with mock despair. “Who’d have guessed?”

At one point, it did indeed seem very unlikely. When it was announced in 2005 that he was the new 007, websites were set up with the express purpose of rubbishing a man who hadn’t yet shot a single scene. One organised a petition calling for him to be replaced, and another raged that he was too, er, blond to be Bond.

“The stuff that people were saying [he adopts a whiny voice]: ‘Oh, he can’t do it.’ I’ve just spent six months doing it, I’ve done it. And it’s funny but, I think because of the furore that was going on, some people were going to come along to see how rubbish it was, so we had that on our side. I wanted people to see the film and be surprised, I wanted them to say, ‘We didn’t know it could be like that.’ But, to be honest with you, all of that was a defence mechanism, so I didn’t have to think about all the s*** that was going on. I was determined to keep my mind on the game.”

We meet in the Soho offices of Craig’s publicist. He’s wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt and he looks remarkably fit – he’s started training again in preparation for Bond 22 (as yet untitled) – although not quite as buffed up as he was for Casino Royale.

I mention the now famous scene in which he emerges from the sea in Casino Royale looking like a poster boy for a muscle magazine. “Yeah, I know,” he interrupts, laughing. “Arrghh! I was big for the last one, and it wasn’t a mistake, it was a definite statement. This guy, when he takes his shirt off, should look like he could kill someone.

“After it finished, I stopped training. I got drunk for three months! No, I didn’t, but certainly relaxed for three months and ate what I wanted, and then it’s hell because as soon as you get back in the gym, you have to work all that off, and it takes much longer than it does to put it on. Last time I did a lot of weights to bulk up because I had to do it quickly. This time I’m going to do more boxing and more running. I need to be physically strong for Bond and, as much as I looked in great shape, I got a lot of injuries, probably due to the fact that I wasn’t doing enough running and jumping, which is what I needed to do in the film. I won’t look physically much different, but I won’t be as ‘no neck’ as I was last time.”

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