James Bond villain reveals nightmare stunt problems with iconic death scene

The secondary antagonist is affiliated with Bond's rivals, the Janus crime syndicate, who have their sights set on acquiring a dangerous satellite weapon known as GoldenEye in the film of the same name.

Unluckily for them, it doesn't quite go to plan, with Boris himself meeting an unpleasant and ignoble end as a container of computer coolant envelopes him, freezing him to death in mere seconds.

Cumming joked in a new interview with Vanity Fair that filming the scene was like "just another day at the office", until he suffered a nasty burn to his scalp due to the dry ice used to film the stunt.

He explained: "What they did was, they had a sort of rubber band around my waist that was tying me, so that when the force of it came I wouldn't fall down... I would just be in the same position.

"So what happened was they chucked the big thing of dry ice; it was lumps of dry ice which then stuck to my head and burned my scalp. 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!'"

Cumming added: "And then they realised something was wrong, so these firemen came on and starting [spraying] my head with, you know, whatever that is – it was a nightmare."

The actor went on to explain that the Boris we see after the smoke clears is in fact a lifelike model, which was created using a full body cast and still lives on as an artefact in a "travelling James Bond exhibition" – to the chagrin of Cumming.

He laughed: "If I had only kept it and put it in a dumpster, I would have been saved future embarrassment."

You can find Cumming's full career retrospective here:

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