The Casino Royale Torture Scene You Didn't Get To See
In 2006, the world's most famous spy movie franchise, "James Bond," received one of its most significant overhauls yet. "Casino Royale," the first Bond film starring Daniel Craig in the lead role, was a gritty, modern take on the traditionally debonair and supremely confident MI6 agent. Where Roger Moore, Sean Connery, and Pierce Brosnan had always played Bond as a seemingly unkillable super-spy, Craig's portrayal was more nuanced and vulnerable.
Nowhere was that vulnerability more on display than when Bond falls into the clutches of Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), the banker funding the terrorist organizations Bond is trying to thwart. Le Chiffre takes Bond prisoner after the spy bested him in the iconic poker scene toward the end of "Casino Royale." Le Chiffre manages to lure Bond into a trap, at which point he tortures the spy by beating him with a rope to coerce him into giving up the password to access the poker winnings.
The scene is one of the most brutal in any Bond film and is even more impactful because audiences have never seen the secret agent so exposed. As Mikkelsen told Vulture, "We've never seen Bond naked, and we've never seen him that fragile, and then obviously there are some undertones with the rope." These elements help make the scene both shocking and memorable, but if Craig and Mikkelsen had their way, it could have been even more intense. Here is the "Casino Royale" torture scene you didn't get to see.
Craig and Mikkelsen tried to make the torture scene even more graphic
In a recent interview with Vulture, Mikkelsen talked about his transition from smaller, independent films and Scandanavian productions to giant Hollywood blockbusters such as "Casino Royale."
His history in those projects, which often have a greater degree of creative freedom than larger films, led him and Craig to develop concepts for the torture scene that would have taken things a bit too far. "We were discussing how to approach it, and we just went further out with something that was really brutal and insane," Mikkelsen said. "One idea was I actually cut him up somewhere, and he had to suffer with that for a while."
Considering how intense the torture scene already is, in which Le Chiffre at one point threatens to castrate Bond, it's hard to imagine it as something even more graphic. Director Martin Campbell felt the same way, as he reportedly told the actors, "Boys, come back to the table. This is a Bond film. We can't go there."
As such, the scene was filmed as audiences know it today, with Le Chiffre never actually making any incisions on Bond. However, even without that level of gore, the "Casino Royale" torture scene remains chilling even today.