At a certain point, director Martin Campbell was just smiling and said, “Boys, come back to the table. One idea was I actually cut him up somewhere, and he had to suffer with that for a while. We were discussing how to approach it, and we just went further out with something that was really brutal and insane. We’ve never seen Bond naked, and we’ve never seen him that fragile, and then obviously there are some undertones with the rope. Speaking to Vulture in 2021, he explained the even more extreme direction they wanted to take the naked torture scene: Mikkelsen didn’t elaborate, but he has in the past. We had so many ideas and the director just looked at us: ‘Guys, come back. “There was this scene where I tickled his balls with a rope. They proceeded to try and make the already darker film even crazier. He had a partner in crime,” Mikkelsen said. “I think he was glad I also came from indie films. But he got the part (with a little lying), and on set he and Craig quickly bonded (even though Mikkelsen said he was bad at poker). He admitted he’d never even seen a Bond film before getting the script, which he fell asleep reading and left on a plane. Per Variety (in a bit caught by Insider), Mikkelsen spoke at the Zurich Film Festival, where he reflected on the movie that broke him through in Hollywood. But it could have been even more out-there. It’s arguably the wildest scene in the Bond franchise.

No naughty bits are shown, but Craig is there in his birthday suit, his testicles being whacked by a rope. Then there was the scene where he’s tortured by main baddie Le Chiffre, played by Mads Mikkelsen. It was Bond, not a Bond girl, who sensually rose from the ocean, as Ursula Andress and Halle Berry had both done. Daniel Craig’s take on the character was angrier, nastier - and nakeder. It also gave us a dramatically different 007. Casino Royale did more than reboot the Bond franchise.

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