Alan Cumming truly suffered to make his James Bond villain memorable.
The classically trained actor naturally jumped at the chance to star opposite Pierce Brosnan in the 007 film “GoldenEye” (1995) but still remembers an excruciating injury he sustained while filming the death of his character, the smarmy Russian hacker Boris Grishenko.
While fans still fondly recall him getting frozen to death by gallons of computer coolant — only moments after he confidently declares, “I am invincible” — Cumming felt anything but indestructible when he was tied into place on set in order for dry ice (mimicking the coolant on screen) to land on the actor without him falling over.
“So what happened was they chucked the big thing of dry ice, but it was lumps of dry ice, which then stuck to my head and burned my scalp,” he told Vanity Fair in a video released Wednesday. “And I couldn’t move because I had this rubber band around my waist.”
“So I’m there going like, ’Ah, ah! This is [hurting], ow, ow!” Cumming continued.
Cumming said that firemen jumped in and broke the lumps of dry ice into pieces after realizing something was wrong, and although the scene didn’t ruin his experience on the first blockbuster of his career, the actor did confess to Vanity Fair, “It was a nightmare.”
Fortunately, the shots of a fully frozen Grishenko were handled with a lifelike mannequin.
Keith Hamshere via Getty Images
The long-running franchise has certainly proven challenging for plenty of other actors across the decades. Daniel Craig told GQ in 2020 that over the course of his five outings as Bond, he tore a shoulder, ruptured his calf muscles and snapped a crucial knee ligament.
Cumming said Wednesday that he declined to take his lifelike mannequin home after filming but stopped short of blaming his injury on that decision. He ultimately seemed grateful to have participated in a Bond film — particularly as he got his own iconic line.
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“Sometimes when you have a catchphrase and people want you to do things from an old film or play or something, it can be annoying,” Cumming told Vanity Fair. “But I actually love when people want me to say, ‘I am invincible.’”
“Just another day at the office,” he joked about the painful stunt.