Mads Mikkelsen talks about his role and making Casino Royale

Born in Copenhagen in 1965, Mads Dittman Mikkelsen was a child gymnast who worked as a dancer before moving into acting, on television and then in films. Danish women’s magazines have called him “the sexiest man in Denmark”. He starred alongside Clive Owen in the Hollywood blockbuster King Arthur in 2004 and his hobbies include football, motorcycling and smoking. He lives in Denmark with his wife Hanne and their children Viola, 14, and Carl, 9 - reports The Times.

There is a scene in Casino Royale where James Bond is tied naked to a chair while his super sensitive bits are whipped with a piece of rope. The mastermind behind this torture technique is his evil nemesis Le Chiffre, aka Mads Mikkelsen, and it’s the Danish actor’s favourite part of the film.

Mikkelsen has the same ice-picked cheekbones as his favourite Bond baddie Christopher Walken (Max Zorin in A View to a Kill) and his name has something of the megalomaniac about it, but his love of brutal torture, he insists, was purely artistic.

“What I meant to say,” he adds hastily, “is that it was the most exciting scene from an acting point of view.”

You may not have heard of him but in Denmark Mikkelsen is a star, a former child gymnast turned dancer and now actor, who has frequently topped polls of “the sexiest man in Denmark”. Now 40, he still turns the occasional backflip but claims his sex symbol days are over.

“That’s all ended,” he sighs, mock woefully. “I appeared in a Danish film called The Green Butchers for which I had all my hair shaved off and I had this huge forehead and I was sweating all the way through and after that I completely fell off those lists. I’ve never made it back on.”

His role in Casino Royale, the 21st Bond film, opening in cinemas on Thursday, is unlikely to help. Le Chiffre is a ruthless criminal mastermind with a deep scar over his milky glass eye that weeps tears of blood when he gets agitated. “It’s quite unsettling to look at,” says Mikkelsen, “and I couldn’t gauge distances with it in, so I was always bumping into things. I was the clumsiest Bond villain ever.”

For a while it looked as if Mikkelsen’s baddie would be less hated than the hero. When Daniel Craig was named as Pierce Brosnan’s successor in the 007 role, chatrooms were bustling with detractors questioning whether a “potato head” blond could play Bond and threatening to boycott Casino Royale. Reports claimed Craig couldn’t drive and wasn’t much of a tough guy after supposedly having his front teeth knocked out in a fight scene.

Early reaction to the film suggests Craig has more than answered his critics and Mikkelsen is quick to jump to his co-star’s defence. “So he’s blond. So what? I sat next to him in the Aston Martin and I saw him moving the gears around very well. And I saw the fight scene where he was supposed to have lost both his front teeth. I didn’t see any teeth go flying — maybe there was a slight chip. It’s like sometimes people, they get a feather, they make a whole bird.”

Casino Royale is “much grittier and more realistic than other Bond movies”, says Mikkelsen. It takes 007 back to the early days when he was a rookie agent in Her Majesty’s secret service. He’s on the trail of Le Chiffre, who makes his money bankrolling terrorists. Having lost his client’s money thanks to Bond’s interference in a terrorist plot, Le Chiffre sets out to win it back in a high-stakes poker game; 007 must beat him and destroy his criminal empire.

Having started out with a Ford Mondeo, Bond wins his Aston Martin DBS in an earlier poker game and Mikkelsen sneaked behind the wheel for a quick test drive. “Only really slowly, though, just around the set. We couldn’t really open it up, which was a real shame. It made a great sound, though. I love that sound.”

Back home in Copenhagen he drives a Volkswagen Golf, which he admits is the flashiest car he’s ever owned. “I’m not really into anything too flash but I do like fast — it is a GTI. Cars are really expensive in Denmark because the government likes to slap huge amounts of tax on everything, but if I could have any car I wanted it’d probably be an old Mustang. They’re just cool.”

Mikkelsen’s motorbikes are equally retro chic. “I’ve got a 1937 Nimbus, a Danish bike. It looks like something Steve McQueen would ride. I love the freedom of it and it doesn’t go quite as fast as a modern bike, which pleases my wife.”

He and Hanne met 19 years ago on the set of La Cage aux Folles in Copenhagen’s equivalent of the West End, when they were both dancers, and married a few years ago. “It’s a drag musical, so I guess she thought I looked good in a dress,” he laughs.

They have two children, Viola, 14, and Carl, 9, who appear surprisingly nonplussed by their father’s Bond connections. “They came to the set once,” says Mikkelsen, “but film sets are quite boring places most of the time, so they just got bored.”

Mikkelsen, too, had been hoping for a bit more excitement. “I really thought when I signed up I’d at least get to jump out of a helicopter, drive fast cars, jump off buildings or something,” says the actor who enjoys doing his own stunts and once broke two ribs in a TV fight scene.

Instead, all he got in the way of action was several pumellings from Craig. “He’s a very hard puncher,” he says with feeling. “And a lot of the fight scenes were improvised and shot in a single take. Sometimes we had to repeat them 20 times until it was right. I had to take him on 20 times!” You can forgive Mikkelsen for relishing that torture scene.

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