That said, the character is described as having a more girthy presence than Mads Mikkelsen’s more svelte and handsome version in the movie. In Chapter 17, entitled “My Dear Boy,” Le Chiffre’s methods against James Bond’s manhood are more exacting, but still quite painful. The chair torture in Casino Royale actually exceeds its literary source material when it comes to its cruelty. It was eight hours of you screaming your lungs out. It was a wonderful day for me-you, maybe not so much! It was a brutal day, obviously. And it was made out of some plywood, so you got splinters.

Because he was swinging the fuck out of it.Mikkelsen: It did break, a couple times. So I kind of had to give over to the fact that this thing wouldn’t break. to stop the knot.Craig: was actually swinging that thing right up under the chair, and it was hitting me, the chair, as hard as it sounded. … And I had a, I don’t know what it was made of, it was fine and it worked, it was a sort of thing that was the shape of my backside, in the chair. But in director Martin Campbell’s second outing meant to introduce a new 007 to the world, he went balls to the chair with a thick, knotted rope.Ĭraig: So I’m sitting in a chair, which had… and I’m naked. For starters, in Ian Fleming’s version of events, Le Chiffre wielded a “cane carpet beater” that he lightly flicked underneath Bond’s chair.

While the finished scene in Casino Royale apparently was toned down from the extreme energy that Daniel Craig and his iconic co-star were working with, it was still a bit harsher than what the 1953 book intended. We were never sure if it was going to be in there or not, because it was on the edge for a Bond film. … It was always a scene that was on the edge. I do remember we had an extensive conversation with Martin Campbell, and we were like, because we came from rock and roll films, we were just diving into that scene and we came up with so many cool ideas, and Martin was listening and listening, and at a certain point he said, ‘Guys, guys, come back, come back, it’s a Bond film.’ We just left that.

Both were discussed, with Mads Mikkelsen revealing the process that reined in the madness on the latter:

But if you’re going to get James Bond and Le Chiffre in the same room, one of two things has to come up: their supposedly laughable poker battle or the ball whipping incident. Reunited by Variety for a very informative video chat, the Casino Royale co-stars spilled a lot of fun stories from the beginning of Daniel Craig’s reboot arc.

Casino royale 2006 torture scene