“It was the worst thing ever”: the James Bond scene Daniel Craig struggled to master
After years of watching Daniel Craig swiftly jump over crumbling buildings, resuscitate his own dying body and casually detach himself from crippling heartbreak, James Bond is not someone you’d associate with struggle or incompetence. In fact, the very thing that causes his emotional incompetence is his inability to struggle, desperate to ignore and rise above anything that could reveal his vulnerabilities.
And one of the films that best captures his relentless facade of cocky indifference and the slow collapse of his ego is the 2006 instalment to the franchise Casino Royale. However, looks can be very deceiving, and in a recent interview, Mads Mikkelsen shared a story about the actor that shatters his illusion of invincibility.
Casino Royale is famous within the James Bond canon for its bold and slightly subversive take on the story, especially given that it is a mainstream studio movie. The director, Martin Campbell, adopts a lens of moral revisionism, adding a prickly edge to the suave character by making the film as much about his emotional blind spots as it is about the mission, intertwining the two and humanising someone known for being a cut-throat killer by breaking down his emotional barriers as he allows himself to care for someone, going against his innate killer instincts.
At the midpoint of the film, there is was one particularly iconic scene as Bond plays a loaded game of poker with his enemy, Le Chiffre, tasked with the mission to prevent him from winning. It’s an extremely high stakes moment, and there many thwarted attempts on Bond’s life during the game as he cooly tries to take on Le Chiffre and bluff his way out of trouble.
However, Mikkelsen (who plays Le Chiffre), shared an insight into the scene, explaining how Craig’s breezy exterior didn’t quite match up with his feelings towards the scene. Mikkelsen said, “Everybody knew how to play poker around that table, except for one: Daniel. He had no clue. He sucked. And it was the worst thing ever that he, of all people, had to beat [my character] and win all my money. It was like, ‘This is wrong.’ Well, I got him back with the rope, so that’s good”.
It is another testament to the genius casting of Craig as this character, never revealing how he truly feels and making everything look effortless, whether it be poker or parkour. Despite his struggle to learn the rules of the game, which, unfortunately for him, is the main crux of the film, Craig succeeded and managed to look fairly relaxed while doing so.
Casino Royale is a stunning addition to the franchise and has been recognised by many as one of the best within this series, with a gritty and creative visual style that felt quite daring and experimental for a studio film, with the opening scene being entirely black and white and shot like a foreign art film, not a blockbuster. It’s effortlessly slick but combined with a layer of emotional destruction from the character of Vesper, whose betrayal can be felt for the rest of the franchise. However, despite the cutting impact of a broken heart, perhaps what haunts Bond the most is his truly terrible poker skills.
