Torturing Bond is all in a days work for Mads Mikkelsen

Torturing Daniel Craig with a knotted rope was all in a day's work for Le Chiffre, the latest Bond villain.

Whipping a naked Bond on the privates with a knotted rope was no laughing matter for Danish heart-throb Mads Mikkelsen - reports the Daily Record.

The 41-year-old actor becomes the most sadistic Bond villain ever as Le Chiffre in new film Casino Royale.

In one gruesome scene he hits Bond, played by Daniel Craig, on the nethers as he sits on a bottomless chair.

The baddie is trying to get a password from 007, who taunts him with lines like: "Can you do it on the right side? I have got a bit of an itch".

But far from laughing at what he was doing Mads (pronounced Mass) has revealed he kept his mind on the job - for Daniel's sake.

He said: "It was specifically a tough situation for Daniel, sitting there for eight hours. So we just had to stay focused.

"But I didn't really hit Daniel, we had something under the chair, don't worry.

"We maybe did it 30 or 40 times, and it was really tough. When Daniel was done and they started filming me, he was still there giving 100 per cent, and thank God for that."

Le Chiffre, an international money launderer, may have blood for tears, be blind in one eye and have a platinum asthma inhaler, but he is far from the recent cartoon Bond baddies like Robert Carlyle's Viktor 'Renard' Zokas in The World Is Not Enough or Jonathan Pryce's Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies.

Mads said of Le Chiffre: "He's not taking over the world. He's not a mad scientist. He is something real that we can see every day. I will not name the countries, but we know them.

"He's in it for the money. He's laundering money for terrorist organisations and in many ways he doesn't care what they do.

"So he's a mirror of companies and certain countries today that benefit them all.

"But even though this is 2006, it's still amagical universe. They do run on cranes and survive various things and I'm still the baddie, but that is the universe of Bond, and if we want to change that we should do a different film.

"But keeping that and bringing it into 2006 was the interesting part I think. Le Chiffre's under pressure. He's afragile person. He's not on top of the world. He's actually getting desperate and because of that he's getting more dangerous. That is a new take and I like that."

Mads has one of the film's great lines when he says: "I've never understood all these elaborate tortures, the simple things can cause more pain than a man can possibly endure."

This is a grittier, darker Bond world, where the hero does actually get hurt and the villains can do damage - indeed they nearly kill him.

But there are still some of the more over the top Bond flourishes, such as the fact Le Chiffre weeps blood from his eye.

And like earlier Bond villains Renard or Blofeld he has a scar above his eye (although in Blofeld's case not as big).

Mads said: "The weeping blood is a disease. It is rare, but it's like high blood pressure in certain situations will make people start bleeding from their nose, and occasionally through their eyes, which is kind of scary."

He had to wear a smoky contact lens to look like he had a blind eye, but Mads claims this made him less scary in the shooting than you will see in the actual film.

He said: "It was comfortable to wear, but what was annoying was that I lost my sense of depth because I was only using one eye.

So I became the most clumsy villain in history. Thank God for editors.

"But we liked the look of it because I was playing a lot of poker in this film and there is nothing more annoying than looking at a person that is unreadable because they only use one eye. It becomes blurry and unfocused and we really liked that detail."

Casino Royale was Ian Fleming's first Bond book and the role of Le Chiffre has been played by Peter Lorre in a TV adaptation in 1954 and again in 1967 in the spoof Bond film, when Orson Welles filled the role.

Unusually, Mads got the part without an audition. He was asked to show the casting director what he could do, but was shooting a Danish film in Prague and couldn't make it.

Mads said: "I didn't expect them to call back again. I thought they probably had a couple of thousand people in mind.

"But they did call back and were willing to pay for my flight as well. That sounded serious, so eventually I did it. I got dressed up and ready to shoot the scene with Daniel but they ran out of time, so they gave me the part like that.

"It was kind of intimidating. On one hand I was glad not to audition because audition situations are normally strange, standing with a machine gun in your hand, shooting at a chopper that doesn't exist.

"On the other hand I also wanted them to see me before they said yes, but I understood that they had seen me in a lot of films. Plus they did have a conversation with me beforehand."

Born in ¯sterbro, Copenhagen, Mads has become one of Denmark's top actors.

He started out as a low-life in 1996's Pusher and and made a string of Danish films as well as TV series Unit One, which made him a household name in his native country.

He has worked outside the country with one-time Bond possible Clive Owen in King Arthur, on Spanish comedy Torremolinos 73 and in Scots film Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself.

The actor, who still lives in Denmark and is regularly voted the country's sexiest man, refuses to think about moving to LA, despite the fact his name will soon become well-known across the world.

He said: "I do welcome an international career and work abroad, but I will definitely stay in Denmark unless work requires me to move.

"I've got two kids and they go to school and I love my home, my language, my films.

"My daughter has been with me since I started acting so she's used to whatever happens. If I come home bald with tattoos or with a beard, she's like, 'Yeah, fine daddy.'

"But she thinks it's interesting, and my son definitely does. He hasn't seen any of my work back home - he's not old enough for that stuff - but he thinks daddy has a cool job."

Mads began his performing arts career as adancer, spending six months in New York at adance school. He also studied ballet, although only as far as training - his main work consisted of dancing in musicals.

He said: "It was rare for a boy to dance. I came from a working class area. No one had ever seen dance and I never dreamt of being a dancer.

"I saw Singing In The Rain and loved it but I didn't discuss that with my friends. You don't do that in a working class family.

"I was a gymnast and someone asked me if I wanted to join a show. I said, 'Yeah, why not? I've got nothing else to do.'

"Then after that people asked if I wanted to take classes, be trained and actually learn the craft. I said, 'Yeah. Let's try it.'

"So that's the way I got into it, but it took me acouple of years before I told my friends exactly what I did."

After dancing for eight years, Mads began to wonder why Danes didn't make films like Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and that got him interested in acting. So he began work in that field in the late Nineties.

Now he has joined the ranks of the immortal - a Bond villain - but who was his favourite 007 baddie?

Without hesitation Mads, who is about to film a Viking epic called Valhalla Rising in Scotland next year, said: "Jaws, for the single reason that he was a giant and I was a very small boy when I saw him.

"I understand that in the second film he actually became a good guy. There was no way I saw that. He was just evil all the way through."

Evil, just like Mads' own Bond baddie Le Chiffre, who is about to chill 007 fans to the bone and make the boys squirm with his knotted rope torture...

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