Keeping it gritty, real and restrained
Star of Arctic, Polar on his wintry logjam, beards and Dracula
Mads Mikkelsen is getting warmed up to jokes about how he’s currently starring in two icy movies, Arctic and Polar.
“We asked for it!” the awardwinning Danish actor says with a laugh, on the line from New York.
“We tried so many different things. Is there any way we can change one of the titles? And there was just no way around it. First of all, Arctic had been released in Cannes as Arctic. And
Polar is billed ‘based on a graphic novel’ called Polar. There was no way around it. We’ll just have to suck it up and live with the jokes for the next two weeks.”
Mikkelsen, 53, plays a conflicted assassin in Polar, now on Netflix. He’s a stranded heroic pilot named Overgaard in Joe Penna’s survival thriller Arctic, now arriving in theatres following its world premiere at Cannes last year.
He likes playing both good guys and bad guys — he made a memorable Bond villain in the 007 caper Casino Royale — but
Arctic demanded more of him than most other movies he’s made in more than two decades of acting. He says he aspires to turn evil again, though, by playing Dracula or Genghis Khan.
Arctic reminds me a bit of Valhalla Rising, your early film with Nicolas Winding Refn where you played a warrior in the wilderness.
Yes! But obviously the character in Valhalla Rising is more of a myth: kind of a legend, a god. And this guy in Arctic is obviously a real person. No, the attraction was just the story. I thought it was so beautiful. I love the fact that (director/cowriter Penna) didn’t fall for the temptation of going down memory lane and having flashbacks and all this for us to get more emotional with this character. I love that. I thought it was a beautiful story about the enormous difference between surviving and being alive, which is two very different things. Are you as resourceful a person as Overgaard?
I think I am. I think you are as well. He’s not an overachiever; he’s an engineer. Maybe the radio stuff I wouldn’t have figured out because I’m just such an idiot with that, but all the fishing stuff and the logic of that, absolutely, I mean it doesn’t take a Boy Scout to figure that out. You’ve got to survive. You got to catch a fish, for God’s sake.
But we wanted him to be not overachieving and we wanted him not to do all mistakes that makes a crowd scream: “No, go to the left!” We wanted to be something that most of us would come up with.
Is it harder to act by yourself, as you mostly do in Arctic, or do you prefer to have other actors to interact with?
It depends on the scene and the situation. Acting is often reacting, most of the time. And if there’s absolutely no one to react to, then you are starting to act, and starting to react to stuff that’s not there, and that might be overproducing sometimes. That means that you have to be aware that you stay on story in the situation, and you can get lost in that a few times. I like both.
Is that a real beard you’re sporting in the film? It looks impressively real.
That’s mine. I don’t recall ever having a fake beard or fake hair. I find it so annoying to work with. It’s just an impossible thing. The glue comes off, it starts hanging, you start not moving your lips when you talk, I just f--king hate it. So we went for a real beard. Are there any famous characters you aspire to play in a future movie, real or fictional?
There are quite a few fascinating historical people out in the world. I’ve always been very fascinated with Genghis Khan. But he’s being done right now by a beautiful British actor and so there’s no reason to go down that (way). As for some of the dramatic characters, I would love to do Dracula. Dracula is one of my favourite characters. And I do have the fangs to prove it as well. So maybe one day I’ll play a vampire!