Mads Mikkelsen On Casino Royale's Action, Poker, & More
As posted on the CBn forums, an article from Live Night and Day interviewed Casino Royale‘s Mads Mikkelsen, who plays the villainous Le Chiffre in the film. The action scenes with Daniel Craig playing poker were just a few of the discussion points…
‘There are worse things to wake up to than the thought of beating the crap out of Daniel Craig,’ jokes Mikkelsen. ‘Then you arrive on set, see Daniel’s face and realise that he’s fully pumped up for a fight. Not only is he a very hard puncher, he’s also completely focused.’
‘What made our scenes particularly severe was that a lot of the fighting was completely improvised,’ he says. Also, those scenes were shot continuously in one take. That meant we had to shoot some of them 20 times. That’s 20 times I had to take on Daniel Craig.’
‘To be honest, I’m not a great fighter. I’d sooner run away. But there’s nowhere to run when you’re shooting a Bond film. You need to get on with it and make it look good. And if my scraps with Daniel look real on screen, that’s because they were real when we were filming them.’
The poker scenes in the 21st James Bond film were one of the highlights for Mikkelsen. ‘We researched the casino scene fairly intensively, and the whole cast became pretty good at poker as a result,’ he says. ‘By the end of the film I’d like to think I got so good that I wiped the floor with everybody–including Daniel. He might get the better of me in the fight scenes, but I definitely got the better of him at poker.’
And what about actually training for the role in Casino Royale? ‘The far side of gruelling,’ quips Mikkelsen.
Click here to read the entire Live Night and Day article on Casino Royale.
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