Steely blue eyes, check; cruel mouth, check; cold and ruthless manner, check, check; eerie resemblance to songwriter Hoagy Carmichael — actually, now that you mention it, yeah.

The announcement that British actor Daniel Craig will play James Bond in "Casino Royale" ended months of gossip and speculation.

With thinning hair, rather broad features and a lean, almost rangy figure, Craig has a chameleonlike quality that has allowed him to take on a wide assortment of roles in the past few years. He was the murderously petulant son in "Road to Perdition" and the skanky handyman in "The Mother." He was poet Ted Hughes in "Sylvia" and the middle-class drug dealer in "Layer Cake." Craig has played a series of unflinchingly "real" characters — none of whom had the swoon factor so often associated with Bond.

But "gritty" seems to be the new key ingredient to sex appeal on screens large and small. Gone is the immaculate charm of Cary Grant or David Niven; today's leading men are flawed heroes, tough talking and more often than not sporting fresh wounds. Which is closer to novelist Ian Fleming's vision.

"It's a good time to go with a grittier Bond," says Esquire style director Nick Sullivan. "The super-suave spy doesn't have the credibility it did in the '60s and '70s."

Fleming never meant for Bond to be a trophy spy. Sophisticated, yes, and possessing the confidence that translates easily into sexiness, Bond was nevertheless a man who could commit acts of violence with a marked absence of postmodern soul-searching. Fleming wanted his man to be a cipher — an avid bird watcher, he named 007 (the 00 indicates a license to kill) after the author of "Birds of the West Indies." The closest thing to an actual description of the man who has come to be a symbol of sleek, suave masculinity is actually found in "Casino Royale." In it, Vesper Lynd (Bond's love interest du jour) remarks that Bond "reminds rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless."