Mads Mikkelsen talks about playing Le Chiffre in Casino Royale

Casino Royale’s arch-criminal is gambling boss Le Chiffre – ‘The Number’ – who Bond has to bankrupt to defeat. Mads Mikkelsen tells Jon Wilde the joys of playing a Dr Evil for the 21st century - reports the Mail On Sunday.

Ever wondered what it’s like to knock seven bells out of James Bond? Then Mads Mikkelsen is the man to ask. As Casino Royale’s chief villain, Le Chiffre, his brawls with Daniel Craig provide some of the most violent scenes of any Bond film.

‘There are worse things to wake up to than the thought of beating the c**p out of Daniel Craig,’ Mikkelsen laughs. ‘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. 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.’

Le Chiffre (The Number) is a scarfaced casino owner with a nice little sideline in torture. His masterplan is to rake in millions through his gambling empire and use the proceeds to fund terrorism. Mikkelsen relished the thought of entering the pantheon of memorable Bond baddies, but he was more than a little put out to discover his role didn’t call for more high-octane action.

‘As soon as I heard that I’d got the part I thought, “Great. That means I can look forward to jumping out of helicopters and driving fast cars over cliffs.” But I went nowhere near a helicopter and the only time I got into a fast car was when Daniel and I sneaked off the set without anyone knowing to drive around in his Aston Martin.

‘The only compensation was that I got to play plenty of poker. We researched the casino scene fairly intensively, and the whole cast became pretty good at poker as a result. 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.’

Mikkelsen readily admits that some of the training required for Royale was ‘the far side of gruelling’, but he was well-prepared – he’s been an exercise junkie most of his life. As a child growing up in the suburbs of Copenhagen, he excelled at athletics and gymnastics.

In Denmark, Mikkelsen has been a household name since starring as an undercover murder investigator in the hit TV series, Unit One. He was voted ‘Sexiest Man In Movies’ in a Danish women’s magazine. One devoted fan was driven to leave her husband and three children and camp outside his Copenhagen home in the hope of securing a marriage proposal (she was dissuaded by Mikkelsen’s wife).

Like everything else, Mikkelsen appears to take this sort of thing completely in his stride. ‘I’d sooner be voted the sexiest man in Denmark than ugliest man. Look at Gérard Depardieu. He looks like a bag of potatoes – and do you think he would have received any female attention if he’d worked in a vegetable store? I once made a movie called Flickering Lights in which I played a psycho who went round killing cows with a machine gun. And still people talked about how gorgeous I looked…’

He has little time or patience for the world of back-slapping celebrity parties, preferring to stay at home with his wife of 19 years, choreographer Hanne Jacobsen, and their two young children.

‘I don’t live the film-star life. When I’m not acting, I like to be at home, sorting through my comic-book collection or playing with my kids. I live quite an oldfashioned life. I can barely turn on a PC and I’ve only just learnt to text message.’

Given which, he’s determined that the global exposure he can expect from being a Bond villain is not going to change his life in the slightest. ‘It might mean that I’m recognised by a few more people. But I’m not planning to move to LA. I’m as famous as I want to be. Besides, they don’t get my jokes in Hollywood.’

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