Mads Mikkelsen was an unknown actor to the Western world before he was hired to appear as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. Before the actor came on board, he was given a script to prepare for the audition and during a plane ride Mads almost blew his chance to appear in the film. Well, we all know how the whole thing turned out, this is still an interesting and funny story.
Casino Royale was our introduction to the new James Bond with Daniel Craig taking over the coveted role. The film was massively successful and helped revive the franchise after a few bad Pierce Brosnan movies. And a lot of the credit for the success of the film has to be given to an engaging and terrifying villain played by Mads Mikkelsen.
Obviously a Bond villain is as coveted role as the role of James Bond. Seeing Mads career balloon after the success of the film also suggest the importance of role in his career. But one small mistake almost resulted in the script being available to the public before the casting process was even done. The Le Chiffre actor almost lost the job and he explained what exactly happened.
Mads Mikkelsen Lost the Casino Royale Script on a Plane
As the casting for the main players of Casino Royale was happening, Mads Mikkelsen got the script for the movie with the material he needed to prepare for the audition. All the pages had his name on them and Le Chiffre was going to be complex character so needed to prepare the role thoroughly. But plane rides and reading are a particularly bad combination.
Mads Mikkelsen read his script and then fell asleep on the place. He had put the script away before falling asleep and after the plane landed he got his things and left the plane. A minute of walking later he realizes something is missing in his possession. The script for the movie was on the plane and his name was on every page.
If someone gets hold of the script and sells it to a publication, his involvement with the film will be over. So, Mads needed to get the papers back and went back to the plane, but the thing is once you are off the plane, there is little to no chance they will let you back in again. He could not get in and went home, thankful for the actor though, no one realized what the script was for and it never surfaced.
During an interview with Vulture, the actor detailed the story, “I got the script before I did the casting, and it was the first time I got a script where your name is printed on every page. I fell asleep on the plane, and I forgot it on the plane. I am the reason why they put your name on the script. This is what they’re trying to avoid.”
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“I panicked. I was out of the plane. I’d walked maybe a minute or something. I realized, ‘Oh, no,’ and I went back, and they wouldn’t let me in. I think I was just lucky. I think somebody who cleaned up that plane had no idea what it was and threw it out. But that is obviously a complete disaster if it ends up on the front page. I mean, this is the worst way of blowing it,” he continued.
But the loss was not severe for the actor as he was able to track down the scenes he needed to perform for the audition and went and did it. As we all know, Mads Mikkelsen was hired to play the role of Le Chiffre and we are all living in a better world because of that. That torture scene alone is enough to engrain the actor and the character he was playing, into the brains of everyone who saw the movie.
Now, we are waiting on the multiple times delayed No Time to Die, that will be Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond. As of this writing, the 25th Bond movie is set for 8 October 2021 release in the US/most of the rest of the world and a week earlier in the UK.
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Casino Royale Daniel Craig James Bond Le Chiffre Mads Mikkelsen
Last modified: April 25, 2021
