When you’re trying to make your name in Hollywood, everyone has to start somewhere. It’s a fact of life for just about every major actor or actress: You have to start small with your roles, like Amy Adams appearing in the beauty-pageant satire “Drop Dead Gorgeous” or Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” years before she became an A-lister. Perhaps one of the most famous examples people love to trot out is that Michael Shannon plays a Wrestlemania-loving young man very briefly near the end of the 1993 comedy classic “Groundhog Day,” 15 years before his Oscar-nominated turn in the Sam Mendes film “Revolutionary Road.” But not every actor’s humble beginning is the kind of thing they may want to brag about.
Consider the most recent man to star as 007, Daniel Craig. Craig was a well-known British actor before he was called upon to play James Bond, but most people in the United States thought they’d first gotten a glimpse of Craig and his craggy face in another Mendes film, the 2002 mob movie “Road to Perdition.” Those folks probably have forgotten (and Craig likely wants to forget) his first foray into American cinema, considering that it’s his lowest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes. That ignominious honor goes to none other than the 1995 Disney movie “A Kid in King Arthur’s Court.”
Daniel Craig wasn’t the only eventual A-lister to appear in A Kid in King Arthur’s Court?
As the title may suggest, “A Kid in King Arthur’s Court” was inspired by the Mark Twain classic “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” with the basic premise being the same: What if someone from modern times somehow was able to travel back in time to when the mythological Arthur ruled over England? It’s an easy fish-out-of-water premise with a fun twist on classical Arthurian legend stories, and the mid-1990s were a high time for low-budget Disney live-action fare with an easy hook and at least one familiar face. In the summer of 1995, when the film was released, that face wasn’t Craig’s, but belonged to Thomas Ian Nicholas. Nicholas (at the time) was best known as the lead of the underrated charming baseball comedy “Rookie of the Year,” and a few years later, he’d be part of the ensemble of the massively successful “American Pie.” Nicholas wound up looking just about as lost in the role of Calvin, the eponymous kid, as the character himself feels in medieval England, but that’s nothing compared to two of his co-stars. See, this didn’t just serve as one of the earliest roles for Daniel Craig; as the photo above makes clear, his female co-star was future Oscar winner Kate Winslet.
Craig was still a few years away from being an even moderately well-known actor, let alone a worldwide phenomenon in one of the longest-running action franchises ever. Winslet, on the other hand, had co-starred the previous year in the disturbing Peter Jackson thriller “Heavenly Creatures,” and only a couple months after this film’s release, she co-starred with Emma Thompson in the beloved adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility.” But in between, Winslet worked alongside Craig, with the two serving as love interests in a subplot alongside Calvin trying to find his way back to the correct time period. When you think about how wild it is to see not one, but two major British film stars so early in their respective careers, you might wonder how this film hasn’t come up more often. Well, it helps that the film has a whopping 5% (yes, five percent) on Rotten Tomatoes. Even when you account for the fact that a film’s rating on this aggregation website doesn’t automatically mean that’s how many critics may love a film, per se … well, five percent is still mind-bogglingly low.
A Kid in King Arthur’s Court reviews were not kind to the film
Just about the only kind thing you can really say about the reviews for “A Kid in King Arthur’s Court” are that there aren’t a ton of them. Even films from nearly 30 years ago only net so many reviews, so that five percent is out of 22 reviews. If you can do your elementary math, though, you know that means there’s just one, count ’em, one positive review for the film, from Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times. And while he did give it a 3 out of 5, it’s not exactly a rave. “This lively time-travel fantasy is the clear result of imagination and reflection,” Thomas notes, which … well, sure, that’s true, but that would hopefully be true of most good movies. The other reviews are pretty rough stuff, with one writer comparing it to “an hour and a half video aquarium for the kids,” and another saying it’s “numbingly bland, homogenized and deflated by an utter lack of original wit or charm.”
“A Kid in King Arthur’s Court” was also no massive hit at the box office; even with a reported $15 million budget, it couldn’t even make that much in the United States when it was released in August of 1995. For Winslet, the upturn in her career would arrive extremely quickly, with both the aforementioned “Sense and Sensibility” dominating a part of the awards discussion that winter and “Titanic” only a couple years away. For Craig, things took a bit longer for him on the silver screen. It was really his star turn in the British crime picture “Layer Cake” that showcased his ability to be as smooth, suave, and debonair as the role of James Bond would require. These days, with his version of Bond finally underground, Craig has pushed himself into different franchises like the Benoit Blanc films as well as edgier indie fare like this winter’s “Queer.” But even as he hits new heights in these distinctive roles, as well as his work on stage, we should never forget (even though he may want to) that Daniel Craig’s career started somewhat low. The good news is, he had nowhere to go but up.
