‘Oh, That’s Right. I’m This Guy.’

Mads Mikkelsen never saw fame coming

Before he became an actor, Mads Mikkelsen spent almost a decade as a dancer, a practice evident in the carriage of his characters. Each vibrates on his own frequency, a jittery drug dealer, a sweaty butcher, a pagan warrior, a worldly cannibal. Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round features one of the rare moments in Mikkelsen’s filmography when he straight-up dances. His character, Martin, has the leaden tread of a man stuck in a midlife crisis. Throughout the film, his friends urge him to show off some moves for old time’s sake, and he resists until the final scene, an ecstatic burst of choreography that pops like a sea spray of Champagne. As an actor in Hollywood, Mikkelsen is better known for playing franchise villains—Casino Royale, Doctor Strange—but he’s perhaps too fast, too fun, to become a simple stock character. Closer to his native Denmark, where he is a star, his characters take on honeyed shades of darkness. As a celebrity, he has a touch of aloofness, as though he exists in his own world of pleasant amusement. “I’m rarely starstruck,” he says, chain-smoking in a green tracksuit at his home in Mallorca. “Maybe because what I’m doing has never been a dream of mine.”

Before you became an actor, you spent about a decade studying dance, including a stint in New York at the Martha Graham Dance Company. How long were you there?

I was there for half a year, maybe more. I was 21 years old. It was the first place I really visited outside of Denmark, and everything was like the movies. There were even kids playing from a broken fire hydrant. I got myself some roller skates to transport myself. I really was a kid of the ’80s.

When you decided to go to drama school after studying dance, did you feel like you were in a rush because you were

older than your classmates?

I was super-pleased to get in because it’s difficult. But part of me thought, Jesus, I’m 30 when I get out. I was in school with people who were almost ten years younger than me. All the 20-year-olds, they’re going to get the jobs. But I did a film in my third year that came out when I graduated, so the doors started opening for me.

That was Pusher, the 1996 Nicolas Winding Refn movie.

Yeah. I was dreaming of making films like Taxi Driver, something we’d never done in Denmark at that time. That period placed Denmark on the map together with directors like Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier. Doing Pusher, we felt as if we were 15. We were naughty, we were doing something illegal, it was cool. But I also bumped into situations where for the first time I was like, Why is this scene here? Where is this going? What is my development? Sometimes, it was not feeling right, and I couldn’t put a finger on it. I hadn’t questioned that too much at that point. This is a big part of the way I approach things now to understand what’s going on.

Then the film came out, and I learned that people write about it and think you’re great or you suck. And it’s like, And who were they? I met some of them. I was like, Seriously, you have an opinion about this film? You’ve never seen a drug dealer in your life, and now you have an opinion?

What is your relationship with fandoms? I know there have been very intense ones throughout your career.

It came late in my life. I did a cop show, Unit One (Rejseholdet), in 2000. All of a sudden, we were aiming at having people who were 5 years old and 95 years old watching it, meaning the corners will be much rounder now. We can’t be too edgy. I remember for weeks in the beginning, I was waking up sweating in the night. I was abandoning everything I believed in.

It came out, and all of a sudden, the world was different. Everybody recognized me. I was fairly old at that point: 30-something. Since then, I’ve never bought a normal Coca-Cola. It’s always “Here’s your cola, Master Mads” or “Get your fucking Coke and get out of my shop.” There’s no neutral Coca-Cola anymore. They all serve me with hate or with love. I hadn’t seen the fame coming. But it’s okay. I handled it fine. It was not about me; it was about the concept of me. I was luckily not 17 years old. You might believe everything. You might believe you are special. I forget it every day I go out. I walk out the door and somebody says, “Hey, can I get a photo?” Then I wake up. Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m this guy.

Was Casino Royale your worldwide

moment?

I guess it was. 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 forgot it on a plane. I panicked. I’d walked maybe a minute or something, and I went back and they wouldn’t let me in. I was just lucky. I think somebody who cleaned up that plane had no idea what it was and threw it out. That is obviously a complete disaster if it ends up on the front page of The Sun. This is the worst way of blowing it. I got a hold of those scenes somehow, and I went and did the audition.

What are your thoughts on these giant Hollywood productions?

The bigger the budget of the film is, the more people have to watch it. They get to play with the big toys. Super-crane and spider cameras. At the same time, there is a formula, and if you miss it, you lose all your money. There is a budget limit where it’s not the director’s film anymore. I don’t know what the number is; I would guess it’s around 7, 8, maybe 10 million dollars. Somebody else is the boss.

Have you witnessed that?

I’ve been lucky. Let’s take the Bond film: There were a few times when Daniel Craig and I went a little far at the table discussing what the scene might be able to do. It was a scene where I tortured him and he’s strapped naked to the chair, which was kind of radical. We’ve never seen Bond naked, we’ve never seen him that fragile, and obviously there are some undertones with the rope. We were discussing how to approach it, and we went further out with something that was brutal and insane. One idea was I actually cut him up somewhere, and he had to suffer with that for a while. At a certain point, director Martin Campbell was smiling and said, “Boys, come back to the table. This is a Bond film. We can’t go there.” We were lost in our indie world, right? You have to respect that. It is a Bond film. That’s the framework you need to understand.

I’ve been in other things where it makes more sense if you change a line slightly. You’re told no because you have to call someone to clear it and they’re living somewhere in Miami and then they have to go through the producer and it’s just like, “All right, I guess we’re not changing that line.” That would never happen on a Danish film. We will on the spot change it up to make it better. So that hierarchy is quite different.

Can you give me an example of when a line has to go through channels?

If I said the line, you would guess it right away. It was quite a few times on a certain film where everybody was agreeing this makes more sense, including the director. You’re trying to be creative while you’re wearing handcuffs, and it’s difficult.

You’ve joked about Hollywood using Scandinavians as villains. Do you feel frustrated by a certain sense of typecasting, or do you not care because you have complex leading roles to do in Denmark?

Yeah, that’s true. I do them back home. I do them in France. I’ve done it in Sweden. Even Spain. I definitely wouldn’t mind if somebody would give me something else in America. That would be great for me. It would be great for them. Let’s do it.

Your latest film, the Oscar-nominated

Another Round, is one such nuanced role. It’s about four friends who teach at a high school and are stuck in middle life. They embark on an experiment where they microdose with alcohol. My understanding is that you all did an alcohol boot camp.

It was such a precise limit they were talking about, like .05 percent. Then they beef it up to .08, .1, etc. We’d read some police reports where people start singing at a certain level. People start not being able to put on their jackets. We didn’t feel a big difference when we did it. Watching the videotapes back, of course, it was completely different. Even after two beers, your hands start having a life of their own. It’s as if they detach a little and become elaborate.

Did you learn anything about your own relationship to alcohol in that process?

Not really. The alcohol part of the film is a kick-starter to tell a story about life. In my character’s case, it’s about a man who’s standing on the platform, and the train has left him. Through the alcohol, he reclaims his life. As opposed to other films about alcohol, there is a tribute in there to drinking. We never wanted to make a moral film. We say it can lift you, and it can kill you.

The director, Thomas Vinterberg, went through a personal tragedy when he was making the film. His daughter Ida, who was going to make her film debut in

Another Round, died in a car accident just as shooting began.

“It’s not that I don’t like hopeful endings.”

We were all in a shell-shock bubble. She was a big part of the film. She was playing my daughter, and it happened within five days of shooting. It was her story; it was her school. Somehow, he felt letting go of the movie, everything would be more empty. He had a choice—lying in the fetal position 24/7 or doing it 12 hours a day. That’s what he told me. And we all said, “That’s what we’ll do.” I’ve never been on a set where so many grown-up men started tearing up in the middle of a scene. Because everything was reminding us of that. There was a strange sense of openness, like, “Let’s try this. Absolutely.” Everybody would have trashed the film to get her back.

Throughout Another Round, the other characters urge your character, Martin, to dance. He relents in the very last scene, which is a gorgeous, celebratory release. What was it like to do a straight-up dance sequence for a movie?

I was just insanely rusty. I hadn’t been dancing for 30 years. I know the character was rusty, and it was supposed to be so. But there was obviously a fraction of me that was slightly ambitious on my former craft’s behalf. I learned that seeing some of the replays was just not a good idea. I was always like, Didn’t I jump much higher once? What is happening?

I know you were concerned with the film ending with a dance. Why?

My concern was that it’s a realistic film. I kept saying, “Listen, this is dangerous. We can come across as super-pretentious. A regular man gets up, and he starts dancing. It’s just crazy.” So in my world, it was always a drunken man’s fantasy. Thomas disagreed completely. And the more we did the film and the film became a tribute to life, the more it made sense to me. When we were supposed to do the scene, all the youngsters were out there. They had not been drinking a single beer; they were intoxicated by life. The sunshine came out. The most famous ship in Denmark, by coincidence, was sailing through the frame. It was like, Of course, I’m going to dance. Let’s dance.

You also disagreed with Thomas on the ending for 2012’s The Hunt, the first film you made together.

Yeah, I’m disagreeable. I tend to be the guy who is always a fan of the darkest version of an ending. I don’t have a lot of allies when it comes to that. I was wrong in both cases. We did an ending in The Hunt where my character gets shot—bang—and I loved it. I thought it was so surprising. I go down like a deer, boom, boom, glasses in the mud, out. Then someone said, “We can’t leave the film there.” Felt too dark. How many people want to see us on this brutal journey and end up with something even more brutal?

Nobody wants to see this. Except for me.

What is it about the darkest ending that appeals to you?

It’s not that I don’t like hopeful endings. But there’s a certain fear in me that we take the easy path sometimes—which is not the case in these two films. But sometimes when I read a script, it can come across like that. I’m like, Whoa, how on earth could they end on that note? And then the film simply doesn’t make sense anymore.

Hannibal, Bryan Fuller’s NBC show about Dr. Lecter and his relationship with FBI agent Will Graham, has in some ways the opposite of your character in Another Round; he’s purely liberated. That liberation is sociopathic because people are not allowed to be pure self.

I loved that show. There was a lot of darkness, but it was an interesting darkness. In Bryan’s warped brain, he would always go down a path where even I would go, “We are going to lose the audience now.” But we didn’t. Because it was never the graphic death. It was always made into poetry.

It was still such an improbable show because it was on NBC.

Exactly. If we had been on some other platform and could do whatever we wanted, would we have gone more for the graphic stuff? Maybe it was a good thing we had to hold back. It served the show well that we didn’t go full-blast Walking Dead on it.

Vinterberg once said success confused him, that when you have buzz surrounding you, it can be hard to make purely artistic decisions. I was wondering if you ever felt similarly.

No. You have to understand, as a director, you make a film and then you might not do anything for two years. As an actor, you go from one thing to the other. You might wrap up the film and then you go into Romeo and Juliet. It’s Shakespeare. You’re shit at Shakespeare. You have to learn how to do it,

but you love it. Everything is a challenge and brutal. You succeed or you don’t, but you learn something.

Actors do get to be a little more promiscuous.

Yeah, the permissiveness thing is true. I am allowed. Well, if you ask fans of

Hannibal, I should not do anything else. But of course, you can’t.

Is there one film you feel was most organic for you?

I love this crazy dark comedy I did, The Green Butchers. My character is called Svend Sweat because he is always lying and sweating when he’s lying. If he doesn’t get his way, he will cry and then he gets his way. He’s the most annoying character you could imagine. Unfortunately, I found I had a lot in common with him. I was at that point famous for being one of these guys that did documentary-style realism. Then we did something that was almost creative suicide. It was a great success, and people saw it for what it was. That was an enormous milestone to dare to do that. That was like, “Hey, it doesn’t have to be this. It can also be this.”

Is there a life philosophy that has carried you through your career?

My approach to what I do in my job— and it might be the approach to life—is that everything I do is the most important thing, whether it’s a play or the next film. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best. But I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a big difference. Because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do is steppingstones leading to something, a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important. ■

Mads Mikkelsen in Another Round.