Mads Mikkelsen Had Many Funny Ideas on Torturing Daniel Craig, but Director Said No

2006’s Casino Royale was the first James Bond movie with Daniel Craig, starting the latest (and already finished) chapter in the vast history of Agent 007 movie adaptations. This film launched Craig’s career sky-high back in the day: before it, the actor was virtually an unknown indie movie performer, a stranger in Hollywood.

Casino Royale changed that in a matter of hours, and this didn’t come as a surprise as this amazing spy action film set a new standard for the genre and allowed for a fresh look at the iconic character of James Bond.

One of the most memorable and painful to watch scenes in Casino Royale was Mads Mikkelsen ’s Le Chiffre torturing Daniel Craig’s Agent 007. The sadistic villain took his sweet time to continuously beat Bond’s testicles with a knotted rope. Ouch.

But even though every man who watched the scene cringed like crazy, this was far from the worst torture idea for this movie. As Mads Mikkelsen recently revealed, he and Craig had quite a few funny alternatives that were way more brutal — but the Casino Royale’s director, Martin Campbell, prohibited them from using those.

“We discussed, among other things, the big torture scene, and we went down the rabbit hole, me and Daniel. We had so many ideas and it was getting crazier and crazier. You could just see Martin going, ‘Guys, come back, it’s a Bond film!’ ‘Oh, you’re right, sorry,’” shared Mikkelsen in his interview with GQ.

The actor claims that their duo wasn’t bloodthirsty in the slightest: the reason for all that grim creativity, he explains, was that Craig came from smaller indie movies, and Mads himself was just out of his Pusher films, and that’s it…

But seeing the sheer number of his sadistic villain roles, we can’t convince ourselves to believe the actor. It can’t be a coincidence if it happened a dozen times!

Source: GQ via YouTube