- Mads Mikkelsen said he and Daniel Craig were asked to stop improvising during a "Casino Royale" scene.
- Their indie film backgrounds saw them try to add more psychological elements to the torture scene.
Mads Mikkelsen said "Casino Royale" director Martin Campbell told him and costar Daniel Craig to pull back when they tried to take the film's famous torture scene in a different direction.
Speaking at the Zurich Film Festival, per Variety, the actor recalled his time making the 2006 film, which rebooted the James Bond story for modern audiences.
The film was also the first to feature Craig as the tuxedo-wearing, martini-drinking MI6 secret agent. Mikkelsen told Variety he bonded with Craig on set because they both felt slightly out of place.
"[Back then] he was the new Bond and everything about him was 'wrong.' His height, his nose, his hair," Mikkelsen said, according to the outlet. "I think he was glad I also came from indie films. He had a partner in crime."
The two actors' indie movie backgrounds saw them try to take one scene in a different, perhaps slightly homoerotic direction, which the director promptly shut down.
At one point in the film, baddie Le Chiffre (Mikkelsen) tries to get some confidential information out of Bond (Craig) by torturing him. He strips 007 naked, ties him to a chair with a hole cut out of the bottom, and demands Bond spill, all while brutally beating his genitals with a rope.
The "Hannibal" star said he and Craig suggested a more psychological approach.
"There was this scene where I tickled his balls with a rope," he said. "We had so many ideas and the director just looked at us: 'Guys, come back. It's a Bond movie.'"
The actors obliged, put away their indie film sensibilities, and what audiences saw in the film's final cut was a straightforward and rudimentary torture scene.
Representatives for Mikkelsen, Craig, and Campbell did not respond to Insider's request for comment made outside regular working hours.
Elsewhere during the conversation, Mikkelsen said that before "Casino Royale" began shooting, he jeopardized the film and his career when he absentmindedly left the script on a plane, Variety reports.
"'Casino Royale' was the first screenplay with my name on every page. Which also means that if you lose it, it's on you. I got on a plane, started to read it and I fell asleep. Then I got out and just left it there," he said.
"I was lucky some cleaning person threw it away and didn't know what it was," he continued. "That could have been the end of my career, right then."