Daniel Craig reveals he's known what his James Bond's ending would be since 2006 because he actually came up with the idea himself

• Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "No Time to Die."
• Daniel Craig told Variety that in 2006 he came up with the idea for how his time as Bond would end.

In a franchise that has done practically everything, it came as quite a shock when James Bond died at the end of "No Time to Die," basically giving Daniel Craig the best 007 exit ever.

Now Craig is finally ready to talk about what led to the end of his Bond. And it turns out it was an idea that had been on the actor's mind since making his first 007 movie, "Casino Royale."

"It was 2006," Craig recalled in a recent interview with Variety. He and the "Bond" franchise producer Barbara Broccoli "were sitting in the back of a car driving away from the Berlin premiere of 'Casino Royale.'"

"Everything was going well," he said. "People liked the movie. And it looked like I was gonna get a chance to make at least another movie."

Craig said it was in that moment that he threw an idea at Broccoli.

"I said to Barbara, 'How many of these movies do I have to make?' Because I don't really look at contracts or any of those things," he recalled. "And she said, 'Four,' and I went, 'Oh, okay. Can I kill him off in the last one?' And she didn't pause. She said, 'Yes.'"

"It's the only way I could see for myself to end it all and to make it like that was my tenure," Craig added.

But it wasn't an easy task for Broccoli to keep her word. Through the years, Craig's Bond portrayal became a box-office sensation. She had to convince her producing partner, Michael G. Wilson, that this was the way for Craig's Bond to go out.

"It was 'no' for a long time," Craig said, adding: "I thought it was forgotten about, put it that way. I didn't bring it back up again until this one."

After "Spectre," Craig's fourth time playing Bond, Craig was ready to leave the franchise, Wilson said.

"We wanted Daniel back and he was very reluctant," Wilson told Variety. "I think we thought, all of us had thought, that [Bond dying] was the best way to end this whole thing."

But how Bond would die became the next conversation.

"How he meets his end wasn't decided yet," Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed "No Time to Die," told Variety. "It was just the fact that he would, so the question then became how to do it."

Fukunaga said there were many ideas for how Bond would die, including "an anonymous bullet."

"I remember that one," he said. "But it just seemed like a conventional weapons death didn't seem appropriate."

What they came up with was Bond single-handedly saving the world by killing the villain Safin (Rami Malek) but in the process getting a virus that would make it impossible for him to have contact with Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) and their child without killing them. So he dies on the island that contains the virus when it is bombed.

"It couldn't feel like a random act," Fukunaga said of Bond's fate. "It had to have weight — without it, it wasn't gonna work. And if we hadn't have got that weight, I don't think we would've done it."