Something wicked has come its way to Broadway this spring. A revival of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, starring Daniel Craig and Oscar-nominee Ruth Negga, officially opened Thursday night at New York’s Longacre Theatre. The Sam Gold–directed production of the timeless play about power and the consequences of unchecked ambition has been a passion project for Craig. It has taken the British actor five years to bring his version of Macbeth to the New York stage.

“The Broadway stage is like nowhere else on Earth,” Craig told Vanity Fair prior to the opening night performance. “It is incredibly scary, and just an exhilarating place to be. It’s incredibly challenging and I’m terrified, always. It’s so humbling to do Shakespeare. You try to tell the story as best as you can, and you try and push yourself, and tackling something like this, you don’t do it alone. You do it with immensely creative wonderful people. Without them, there would be nothing. So that collaborative effort is really what draws me to this.”

The former James Bond star is no stranger to the stage, and already familiar with Shakespeare, having previously played Iago in Gold’s 2016 production of Othello at the New York Theatre Workshop. His last Broadway outing was for the 2013 revival of Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal with his wife, Rachel Weisz.

“Daniel is one of the greatest collaborators I have ever worked with,” said Gold, who won the 2015 Tony Award for best direction of a musical for Fun Home. “He has amazing ideas, he’s very game, he’s open, he’s trusting, and he gives other people a sense of their own power and strengths…. As an actor, as a friend, and as a collaborator I find him to be an incredibly moving human. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

In recent months, the story of Macbeth has never been more popular. Denzel Washington earned an Oscar nomination for playing Macbeth in Joel Coen’s black-and-white interpretation in The Tragedy of Macbeth and a modern stage version starring James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan wowed London last fall with their fresh take on the Scottish play. Compared to these two interpretations, Craig and Gold’s 15-week limited-engagement production is much bloodier, but still tells a tale of destruction created when ambition is consumed by power and advancement.

“The play really touches upon many important themes such as marriage, ambition, power, and death,” said Craig. “Those things are relevant today as they ever were. Every time I get back into Shakespeare, I realize the genius of it and that’s one of the reasons that it’s lasted so long. His works still have the power to affect our relationships and our culture.”

According to Oscar Isaac, who attended the opening with his wife, Elvira Lind, in support of Gold—he starred in Gold’s 2017 stage production of Hamlet at New York’s Public Theater—he also feels the Bard’s works are vital.

“Shakespeare’s writing reaches out from way in the past and still has so many relevant things to say about jealousy, love, death, ambition, and so many more relatable themes that affect our lives right now,” said Isaac on the arrivals red carpet. “Any chance to be able to bring Shakespeare to now, and have it reflect what’s happening now is an exciting and important moment. Somebody like Sam can reinvent it and still make it feel current. He knows how to find the personal and he’s subversive. He knows how to embrace the things that we all love about Shakespeare, and he’s not afraid to confront it and wrestle it into something that feels modern.”

Negga takes center stage as Lady Macbeth, her first Broadway role. The Irish actor joked that she’ll need a bucket strategically placed around the stage due to her onstage jitters. “The terror gets worse for me. You can’t erase the nerves and you sort of integrate them in your performance,” she said. “A positive is that it can give your performance an edge.”

Lady Macbeth has long been synonymous as a conniving, ruthless, evil woman who manipulates her husband into committing murder, while her husband is viewed as a tragic hero. Negga says the Lady Macbeth character is unfairly maligned, and interprets her as a “vibrant loving woman” who is “lynched by the nature of power.” She hopes her portrayal will disassociate the notion that ambitious women are intrinsically evil.

“The thing about Lady is that she’s completely not misunderstood, but deliberately misaligned with ambitious women being just automatically naturally evil,” said Negga, who last appeared in the Netflix drama Passing. “It’s nothing to do with ambition. She just made a bad choice. We all make bad choices. It’s not to do with her ambition. It’s a useless archetype that serves no one apart from misogynists.”

Earlier this month Craig and some of the production’s cast members contracted COVID-19, temporarily halting preview shows. “I felt terrible to cancel and disappoint our audiences,” said Craig. “I am feeling well now, and I’ve been good to go.” At one point, with all the show’s understudies already filling in for other roles, Gold was forced to take to the stage himself and play two small roles. “The acting part of it was the least freaky part. My cast not getting COVID and to be able to get the show together was the scary part,” recalled Gold, who admitted he and Craig did celebrate the end of the unique experience with a “stiff drink together.”

Fortunately, Thursday’s opening night show was a huge success with notable VIP guests in the audience that included Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Strong, James Franco, Jeffrey Wright, Marisa Tomei, Michael Kors, Danai Gurira, and Candice Bergen cheering Craig, Negga and the rest of the cast. Also in attendance was Bryan Cranston, the Breaking Bad Emmy winner who earned a Tony Award for best actor in a play for his portrayal of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Broadway play All the Way and another Tony award for playing Howard Beale in the play Network. With so many of Hollywood’s elite movie stars like Craig returning to Broadway, Cranston explained that he and many actors may find performing in front of a live audience similar to riding a roller coaster.

“If you had a chance to go to an amusement park and either ride the ride that goes really slow and around in a circle, which is very safe, or the roller coaster, which is scary, what do you want to ride on? I want to ride on the roller coaster even though I’m going to be scared, and that’s what it’s like to work on the stage for an actor,” explained Cranston. “Every performance is like riding a roller coaster because you really don’t know what’s going to happen from one night to the next. Things do happen that go wrong and you adjust and you find yourself surprised. There’s nothing like it…. The experience on the Broadway stage is just incredible.”

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