“I tickled his balls”: the James Bond scene that became too kinky for comfort
Despite being one of cinema’s definitive lotharios, having bedded dozens of women over the decades, the James Bond franchise has never been regarded as particularly erotic or titillating.
It’s always been a core tenet of the character that he’s a mad shagger, and there have been plenty of smouldering scenes and scantily-clad women in the saga’s 25-film history, but nothing that would ever leave audiences getting too hot under the collar.
However, what about some ball-tickling in a scene that sounds like it was dangerously close to devolving into outright BDSM? That doesn’t sound very Bond-ish, but when you’ve got a naked Daniel Craig and a mischievous Mads Mikkelsen on set, things can end up getting too kinky for comfort.
Having run out of bedposts to add notches to since 1962’s Dr No, you’d be forgiven for thinking that an exchange between 007 and one of the many ‘Bond girls’ would be responsible for causing a poor cameraman to de-fog his lens when the sexual tension ratchets up by several notches.
Instead, it was one of the most brutal scenes in Casino Royale, where Craig’s 007 is tied to a chair by Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre and endures some rope-assisted whipping. It was supposed to be harsh, unforgiving, and brutal, but in the throes of the action, the actors improvised a different approach.
“He had a partner in crime,” Mikkelsen suggestively said. “There was this scene where I tickled his balls with a rope. We had so many ideas, and the director just looked at us: ‘Guys, come back. It’s a Bond movie.'” You can save the world, get the girl, and defeat the villain, but you can’t have your baws tickled, apparently.
Well, clearly you can, it just won’t make the final cut. They did sort of work the kinky element into the script in a way, with Bond remarking how “the whole world’s going to know that you died scratching my balls,” regardless of Martin Campbell requesting that his actors take a couple of steps back and whittle down their sexually-charged version of the scene.
It’s one of the most memorable sequences in Casino Royale, but would it have been more or less memorable if Bond was getting his balls tickled? It’s not a question many people will have considered, or maybe it is, but one thing it would have prevented was the collective wince from large parts of the audience when 007 takes the full force of that knotted rope directly to the undercarriage.
Either way, things were in danger of getting frisky on set when the two stars were trying to add some improvisational flourishes in the heat of the moment, and you have to wonder how far they’d have gone if Campbell hadn’t stopped them.
