You weren’t expecting that, Mr Bond! Torture scene almost cost Daniel Craig his licence to thrill
IT HAS become one of the most famous torture scenes in recent movie history – and now James Bond actor Daniel Craig has revealed his naked ordeal in Casino Royale left him far too exposed for comfort.
Film fans winced when the spy suffered as arch-villain Le Chiffre attacked his most delicate areas with a knotted rope. But they were unaware that Craig was only millimetres away from having his private parts tenderised in real life.
The stars have told Hollywood trade paper Variety how the 007 actor was supposed to be protected by a piece of plywood hidden from cameras. But it shattered during Le Chiffre’s sadistic onslaught, splintering dangerously close to the actor.
Craig, 53, said he had to persuade himself to trust that the plywood prop could withstand the heavy blows delivered by co-star Mads Mikkelsen.
‘I’m sitting in a chair naked,’ he said. ‘It was a thing that was the shape of my backside in the chair which I sat in.
‘[The rope] was actually swinging right up under this thing and it was hitting the chair as hard as it sounded. So I had to give over to the fact that this thing would not break, because [Mikkelsen] was swinging the f*** out of it.’
But Mikkelsen, 55, recalled: ‘It did break. It was made out of plywood and you got splinters going up like that.’
Despite the unexpected drama, the naked Craig still manages to utter the memorable line to his tormentor: ‘I’ve got a little itch down there, would you mind?’
Mikkelsen told Craig how much he enjoyed filming the scene, adding: ‘It was a wonderful day for me – you, maybe not so much! It was eight hours of you screaming your lungs out.’
For Craig, in his first outing as Bond, his abiding memory was, unsurprisingly, anxiety.
‘I was nervous,’ he said. ‘I remember that day, knowing that the scene was good, knowing that it was on the edge and you came in and you just smacked it out of the park. You were so in it. And it was joyful.’
Mikkelsen said he was surprised the scene was included in the 2006 movie at all as ‘it was on the edge for a Bond film’.