Many James Bond movie lovers would remember Casino Royale with a tinge of excitement.
However, it was a film that nearly cost the protagonist, James Bond, acted by Daniel Craig, his manhood.
This emerged in an interview of Daniel Craig and a co-star, Mads Mikkelsen, in Hollywood trade paper, Variety. Mikkelsen was the one who nearly tenderised Craig during the shoot.
The scene where the near-catastrophe happened showed a naked James Bond being tortured by rope-swinging villain, Le Chiffre, played by Mads Mikkelsen.
A piece of plywood hidden from the cameras was supposed to protect Daniel Craig’s privates from the swinging knotted rope.
However, upon a particularly hard swinging by Mads Mikkelsen during filming, the rope broke the plywood into smithereens and came within millimetres of Craig’s exposed privates.
It has become one of the most famous torture scenes in recent movie history, but it is one that makes Craig wince each time he remembered how close he was to losing his licence to thrill.
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’.
