With roles in films like Pusher, The Hunt and After the Wedding, he has taken a place as one of our region’s foremost actors. In addition, he has instilled artistic energy in international feature films like Casino Royale, Doctor Strange and Rouge One. Ahead of Mads Mikkelsen visiting Gothenburg to receive the festival’s Nordic Honorary Award, we ask ourselves: What makes him so interesting to look at?

At first, Mads Mikkelsen claims that he likes Mölndal. But he does not fool me that easy.

– I was extremely grateful for it, he says politely on his characteristic Copenhagen accent.

I have just asked how he found it during the year in the late 80’s, when he lived in Mölndal and danced at Balettakademien in Göteborg. But when I ask him to tell me more, it becomes clear that the stay hardly was the happiest period in his life.

– You know Mölndal? I missed Copenhagen so much that I moved back home before the year was finished. I had no money. Really, zero! I knew no one. So I did nothing. I came home from school, I went to the store and bought pasta and ketchup that I ate alone in my little flat.

When he now, 32 years later, returns to Gothenburg to receive the Nordic Honorary Dragon Award, he does it as one of the Nordic countries most successful actors internationally.

If you call people who have worked with Mads Mikkelsen, you are reminded how unfair the work on the white screen is. Some may struggle with performances  and techniques for decades without ever breaking through. Others are born with particularly expressionistic faces and possesses that imprecise ability that makes it impossible to tear your eyes away from them.

Shake it All About

Many of his industry colleagues I talk to have a hard time hiding their jealousy when they talk about Mads Mikkelsen. He has such a presence. He speaks so naturally. Most people mention the face.

Jonas Åkerlund, the director that has made videos for Madonna, Beyoncé and Rolling Stones, and who has spent the last year adapting the comic novel Polar into film, says:

– When I got the question to direct Polar, I turned it into a dealbreaker: I will only do it if Mads wants to play the main role. The film evolves around a man in his fifties who barely speaks. And I know no other actor who can communicate so much by saying nothing.

– Then I do not mean that he is handsome. The whole world knows that he has an extremely good appearance, even though he smokes and drinks beer. It is about something else. It is amazing to see when you work with him. He can say: ”Wait, I am going to try something else. ”I do not even notice any difference until I rewatch the take and discover that he as changed everything. I have no idea how the hell he does it.

David Denrick, who played against Mikkelsen in A Royal Affair and Men and Chicken, tries to explain what it is really about:

– He has a nice contact with his vulnerability, like you can see in The Hunt or Open Hearts. There is something destructive in how he dares to rest infront of the camera. It seems so easy and relaxed when he does it. He has a calm in himself which makes you want to look at him.

The older brother Lars Mikkelsen, also successful actor, has in the magazine Metronyt told about the childhood in the 70’s Norrebro in Copenhagen.

”Once when we played out on the yard, there was a drug addict in a container looking for his dope. I think that he had thrown it there when the police came by. In any case, us kids got a fiver each for helping him find it. Mom was pretty hysterical when she heard about it.

The mum was a nurse, dad worked in a bank.

– I have been thinking about how it comes that both I and Lars became actors, says Mads Mikkelsen. When we were young, we did not even know the profession existed. We never went to the theatre. But we watched a lot of film. Dad recorded all DR’s radio plays on cassettes, we learned them by heart. He build a puppetry and came up with new plays for us every night. There were a lot of stories in our home. Lars started juggle and making street theatre and was discovered by some revue. I became a gymnast and later on a dancer.

Arctic 

And it was as a dancer that he ended up in Mölndal. Returning back home, he joined Dr Dante, an anarchistic theatre group who during the 90’s fostered actors like Paprika Steen, Kim Bodnia, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Trine Dyrholm and Sofie Gråbøl.

– He was a fixed star and became a great inspiration for me and many others, says David Dencik. It was something with is credible line, and his and his deep connection to Köpenhamn that I terribly liked.

The big breakthrough came with Pusher, Nicolas Winding Refns, brutal low budget drama about struggling hobby gangsters in Copenhagen’s under world.

– Without Pusher I do not know what would have become of my actor career, says Mikkelsen. I was lucky that Nicolas wanted to make a film that was different from all other Danish films, at the same time as I started to work with film. Us two and Kim Bodina practically became a little group who could define ourselves.

Three years later, they deepened their collaboration in Bleeder, where Mikkelsen played a video store manager with social anxiety.

– Me and Zlatko Burik worked in the video store for three months before we started to record. We wanted to make it our own and find a natural relationshop between our two characters. You could have made a more effective pre-work, but we wanted to try our way forward.

To market the film, Mikkelsen and Winding Refn was sent to the film festival in Cannes. Mikkelsen, who never had heard about the film festival, who did not know how to sell in a film, and who thought that Cannes was located in the Alps, packed his wool socks and a warm jacket. The industry people at Croisetten, therefore met two sweaty and confused Danish men who resembled more street vendors than successful filmmakers when they handed out DVDs and asked: ”Do you want to see this film?”

The Hunt 

The following years, he was in the front line of the successful wave that Danish film experienced around the millennial. He made memorable contributions in Susanne Bier’s films Open Hearts and After the Wedding. Together with the screenwriter and director Anders Thomas Jensen, he has showed a more humorous side in films like Men and Chickens, Flickering Lights, and The Green Butchers.

– Anders Thomas Jensen and I did something very theatrical on film, which was both fun and intimidating since it was completely new. But we decided that the characters could be completely crazy, as long as we took them seriously.

He has received most attention for his contribution in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, for which he was awarded the actor prize at the film festival in Cannes.

– The Hunt was an important film for the since it opened so many doors, it made so many in the industry discover that I existed.

After his acclaimed role contributions in feature films like Casino Royale, Rogue One and Doctor Strange he has lately got more and bigger roles in international productions.

Besides Jonas Åkerlund’s Polar, Chaos Walking – with screenplay by Charlie Kaufman – and Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, Mads Mikkelsen is in 2019 starring in Arctic, where he plays a scientist who has crashed on Arctic. A few worded Robinson Kruse story in a snow scenery. Mads Mikkelsen plays basically a part against himself and an unconscious pilot that he carries around on a stretcher.

– After ten days of recording without a counterpart. I started to be scared that I was too boring. When my character’s home made fishing hook broke I exaggerated my reaction. But it didn’t fit in the film, where it was supposed to be acted as a part of his daily life.

 

Open Hearts

The physically trying production, in exposed Arctic environments with unpredictable weather, he got other, more concrete effects of the acting.

– I was surprised by how close you have to your feelings when you are so physically drained. Everything you see in the film, I do by myself.

I walked in thick snow and carried another human for eight to ten hours a day. I lost a lot of weight in a short time and was completely drained afterwards. But it was also a part of the story. There is a scene where he loses hope and feels fuck it all that became much more emotionally charged than we hade expected, for neither I nor the team had no energy left.

I have understood that it was intentional to be unprepared for the film production’s physical trials?

– I could have gone there ahead and explored how I could react to the environment. I could have gained muscles to handle the efforts. But my character is not prepared to land there.

How are you otherwise affected by the roles you play?

– I have always tried to be anti-pretentious. When I am at work, I am completely consumed by it. But when I get home, I no not force my kids to call me Tonny. The press tend to focus on actors being consumed by their role, are away from home and gain or go down in weight. Men det er noget pretentiöst pris! I think that even children to actors have the right to know their parents.

What would you say that it takes to be a good actor?

– Naturally, there are many different views. I like when it does not look like you make an effort, ever though it is really hard. I like to look at actors who can act on a stage where something happens but where you can see that something completely else is happening inside them. It is important not to drain the role with too many personal thoughts and feelings. Characters rarely know themselves what situations they are in. The intrigue is often in the characters doing things that make the audience want to scream: “No don’t do it.” As an actor you should be wiser than your character, who cannot foresee what is about to happen.

What does he then say about the wide opinion that he is so magnetic on film. What is it that makes him so difficult to take your eyes from?

– It is unfair, but some people are really born with an appearance that the camera love. Unfortunately I am not one of them. Instead, I belong to those actors who have to work hard to get the camera to like us. And there you make a choice. Either you can over do it, or you can dare to trust that something happens inside you that makes you interesting to look at.