How Real Is The Crocodile Scene From The James Bond Movie Live And Let Die?

When the best James Bond movie ever made, "Casino Royale," debuted in 2006, it introduced audiences to a new, rugged, and much more grounded version of the famous spy. Gone were the elaborate Q gadgets and impossible-to-escape death traps. In fact, Q as a character was removed from the films entirely. All these Bond trademarks would find their way back into the franchise with 2012's "Skyfall" — still the biggest Bond movie ever, despite not being very good — but for "Casino Royale," they were eschewed in favor of a cinematic realism that rendered Bond's origin in suitably gritty terms.

But by the time Daniel Craig's tenure as Bond ended, much of that tasteful restraint had been abandoned — a fact never more obvious than when Eon Productions and director Cary Fukunaga decided to have Craig's formerly grounded spy killed off by an entire cluster of missiles at the end of "No Time to Die." Of course, this is far from the first time the Bond saga depicted something unrealistic — though it was the first time it did so with a supposedly grounded version of the titular spy. Indeed, the movie that nearly killed off cinema's most enduring franchise, "Die Another Day," is still seen as the worst Bond movie largely due to its more fanciful elements, such as a giant ice palaces, invisible cars, and that favorite trope of hacky blockbuster filmmaking: giant sky lasers.

But unrealistic elements and unlikely scenarios actually have a proud history within the Bond canon, beginning with Sean Connery's 007, who came very close to having his nether regions removed by an unnecessarily slow-moving laser beam. Then there was the time Roger Moore's Bond jumped a line of crocodiles to escape from certain death. But this unlikely moment was actually much more real than most folks realize.

James Bond films aren't the most realistic spy movies, but that's part of the reason we love them. Bond himself is a fantasy, one which author John Le Carré famously tried to undermine with his more true-to-life character George Smiley. But while Le Carré's novels and their adaptations have an appeal all their own ("Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is one of the best spy movies of all time), Bond remains the pre-eminent cinematic spy to this day — even with all the ice palaces and crotch lasers.

Back when Roger Moore was playing the character, he got into all manner of absurd and ridiculous scenarios, from laser battles in space to snowboarding while accompanied by "California Girls" for some reason. In his first outing in the tux, 1973's "Live and Let Die," Moore's Bond finds himself in a classic 007 predicament when he's left on a tiny island in the middle of a crocodile-inhabited swamp. He then tries to distract the crocs by throwing meat into the water before using his electro-magnetic watch to lure a boat towards him. When both attempts fail and the crocs bear down on Bond, he simply skips his way across a line of the reptiles' heads to safety in an amusingly bathetic finish to the whole sequence.

While this ranks somewhere towards the bottom of ridiculous Bond moments, it still reads as fairly unbelievable when Moore's spy skips his way to freedom — like something more at home in a Disney cartoon than a spy movie. But this is one Bond moment that is actually a lot more real than you may know. The scene was shot on a real Jamaican crocodile farm owned by Ross Kananga, which, according to Moore on a behind-the-scenes featurette, housed 1,500 of the creatures. Kananga had been performing tricks with crocodiles since he was a child, and even got his own head caught in one of the reptile's jaws for 20 minutes at one point. He also watched his own father, with whom he performed the shows, get eaten by one of the crocs. So, you can imagine a man who's been through that sort of trauma wouldn't be all that impressed with Bond's daring escape over the heads of a line of crocodiles — and you'd be right. In fact, Kananga was so unperturbed by the stunt that he agreed to do it himself ... with real crocodiles.

For scenes involving Roger Moore and the crocs, several foam rubber animals were added to the swamp while the rest of the live crocs were removed. But once the time came for Bond's precarious escape, Ross Kananga donned Moore's outfit, complete with crocodile skin shoes, to take on the job of actually jumping across three live crocs. As the behind-the-scenes footage shows, he actually had to perform the stunt five times before he made it, and the unused takes are frankly unbelievable, with Kananga falling into the water multiple times while his crocs snap wildly at him. Tom Cruise might have done six takes of the motorcycle jump in "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning" but, frankly, if I don't see him jump three live crocodiles in the next "Mission: Impossible" movie, I will remain unimpressed.

According to BoldenTrance, Kananga had at least bound the animals' legs to make the stunt less risky, but their jaws remained free to snap at their owner as he tried jumping his way to the shore. As the stuntman revealed in a 1973 interview (via BoldenTrance), "The film company kept sending to London for more clothes. The crocs were chewing off everything when I hit the water, including shoes. I received one hundred ninety-three stitches on my leg and face."

Still, for a man who'd been trapped in the jaws of a croc for a full 20 minutes, watched his own father be eaten alive, and as Tee Hee actor Julius Harris revealed, once had a "pet lion" that patrolled his crocodile farm, the experience was surely all in a day's work. Meanwhile, Moore was happy to simply watch the multiple takes play out, while Kananga was compensated with a $60,000 payout. Sadly, he would pass away from a heart attack five years later, but his daring efforts remain immortalized in "Live and Let Die."