Mads Mikkelsen may be best known stateside for his role as the blood-crying villain Le Chiffre in Daniel Craig’s first 007 outing, Casino Royale, but the 53-year-old Danish actor has spent his career defying expectations at virtually every turn.
Having risen to stardom courtesy of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy—in which he played a psychotic drug dealer—Mikkelsen has spent the past decade-plus vacillating between Hollywood roles that hinge on his intense charisma, be it as a famed serial killer/cannibal in NBC’s Hannibal, as the father of the Death Star in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, or as the evil sorcerer Kaecilius in Marvel’s Doctor Strange. And that’s not even taking into account the acclaimed work he’s done abroad, including After the Wedding, A Royal Affair (opposite Alicia Vikander), and The Hunt—the last of which, about a schoolteacher wrongly accused of sexually assaulting a young girl, earned him the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Equally comfortable segueing between projects that are grand (Clash of the Titans, The Three Musketeers) and stripped-down (Valhalla Rising, again with Refn), Mikkelsen is an imposing leading man with character-actor versatility. He proves that yet again in the coming weeks, when he debuts two different, if similarly named, projects.
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In Jonas Akerlund’s graphic novel adaptation Polar (on Netflix January 25), he plays a famed hitman who must fend off a horde of rival assassins while protecting a young neighbor (Vanessa Hudgens)—a film that allows him to indulge in some seriously cartoonish gunmanship. On the other end of the spectrum, Arctic (in theaters February 1) finds him embodying a solitary man who must trek through the vast, snowy abyss after a plane crash, instigating a rugged, realistic man-against-nature survival story. Both reconfirm Mikkelsen’s forceful magnetism, and on the eve of their back-to-back debuts, we spoke with him about getting into action-ready shape, whether he worries about making movies featuring gun violence, his ordeal out in the Arctic, and the continuing timeliness of The Hunt.
You have two films coming out within a week of each other—Polar and Arctic—and while they couldn’t be more dissimilar, that’s not true of their titles. Are you worried there’ll be confusion about which is which?
The second we started going with the name Polar, we had already done Arctic, and I knew that was going to be trouble. So I was like, OK, they might open a year apart, or at least a half-year apart. And then they open the same week! So here we go. But maybe it’s a good thing, because now we are addressing it, and people are aware of both films, and they’re aware that they’re very, very different films.
Both of these features arrive in the wake of your big-budget work in Rogue One and Dr. Strange. Was it nice to get back to somewhat smaller-budget projects, as a headliner?
Yes. It’s always wonderful to go back and do small-budget films. And after you spend a while there, it’s always wonderful to go off and do a big-budget film. That’s the strange luxury that I can just say I’m grateful that I have—that people see me through different eyes, and offer me different things. Being able to go back and forth is just something I can only dream of continuing doing.
Polar is a flashy, ultra-violent action movie. Did you have to do much training, especially with guns, to prepare for the part?
A lot of training; a lot of gun stuff. Obviously, the choreography of all the fights—a lot of that. Finding the style we wanted. Making the guy heavy and old, on the verge of dying—that’s a different technique than wearing sunglasses and a slick suit. We wanted it to look brutal and tough. So that was a lot of work going into that.
You have a background in gymnastics and dance. Does that come in handy for such physical training?
Absolutely. One hundred percent, sure. Obviously, I can’t dance in the scene, and I can’t do gymnastics in the scene [laughs]. But to have that physical awareness is a very helping hand. That means you might avoid like 10 percent of the bruises, and that’s a good thing [laughs].
Your character also speaks eight languages. How many can you speak?
I can touch bases with, I think, eight languages. I wouldn’t get by fluently in any of them, but I can do the basic stuff in quite a few languages.
Which ones?
Danish is one [laughs]. English. I’ll do a fair bit of French and German. Working on my Spanish. I speak Swedish. I’m picking up a little Russian, the more I go. I’m just curious with languages. I think it’s cool.
You’re shirtless quite a bit in Polar. Did that motivate you to get in tip-top shape for the film?
There is always a vanity part, and you have to be careful how to play it. We wanted the guy to look as if he could mean business when he had his shirt off, but we didn’t want him to look like he was spending eight hours in the gym every day. So we didn’t mind that he was a fiftysomething—we wanted to be able to look at him and say, you know what, he can probably break your arm. That’s what we were going for. Not the bodybuilder, but somebody that was capable.
There’s been talk in recent years about whether movies like Polar glorify guns—and gun violence. Was that a concern?
No. Not at all. I don’t want to quote him, but I think Quentin Tarantino has said it a few times, and put it well: we’re making films. If we inspire any fucking idiot out there, it’s on them. It’s not on us. Those idiots would do stupid things anyway. This is a film—this is a graphic novel that comes to life on the big screen. What we want to talk about in the film is your past chasing you down. We want to talk about how two awkward people can somehow unite and can become a unit that is so interesting. That’s the stuff we want to talk about. And then there’s a frame around that which is insane and crazy and violent. But that’s not our main object.
Arctic exists on the other side of the cinematic spectrum, and from what I read, you spent 19 days shooting the film in Iceland. How harsh was the production?
What you see there is the real deal, and that’s basically what we went through. I mean, it was insane! It was a mistake—we shouldn’t have done it! [laughs] No, I love that film. I think it’s such a beautiful, poetic film. But once we were there, it was like, left foot in front of your right foot, and just continue, continue, and one of these days this will be over. Because it was just a brutal, brutal uphill battle.
How do you think you’d fare in such a scenario? Did making the film teach you some survivalist tips?
I have a hunch I’d fare pretty much like this dude. You know, we tried not to make him a specialist. He’s a man who’s stranded, and had no plans for being stranded, so he’s doing what he thinks is common sense to get some food and shelter. Hopefully, that’s an image of how a lot of us would deal with this. We didn’t want him to be a supergenius or super-dumb at it. We just wanted him to do common sense things that we might have done as well.
The film is a very solitary affair; even your co-star barely speaks. Is it a fun challenge to carry a project on your own, without the benefit of much dialogue or interpersonal interaction?
Yeah, it’s a big challenge. It’s something special. There’s so much said between these faces, and their little gestures, and in general what these characters sacrifice for each other, that that’s the entire story. We don’t necessarily need a lot of words for that. It’s quite easy to read what’s happening here.
Were there any feats—for example, pulling that sled up the hill during blizzard-like conditions—that were a particularly strain?
I wasn’t worried about it—I knew it would strain me. Everything was taking a toll on you. And we shot in fairly chronological order. The last day of shooting, which is also the last scene of the film, there was nothing left in the tank. That was it—nothing left. So that was a brutal day. We saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but it seemed so far away throughout that day.
One of my favorite films of yours is Tomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, and it feels more relevant than ever, in today’s heightened climate of sexual assault, and public accusations about such crimes. Do you feel like the film has grown more timely since 2012?
Well, this is dangerous territory you’re treading into now. And we all know that it is difficult—we start mumbling, we start stuttering when we start talking about it. Because there is common sense about the whole thing, and that’s somehow almost illegal to talk about today. There are territories that are completely taboo, and The Hunt, when it has to do with children, that’s definitely the biggest taboo of all things. And if you’re the slightest bit accused of anything, that accusation will never, ever leave you. So yeah, I think you might be right—we didn’t make the film with that in mind, but that’s definitely something we can discuss today as well.
Despite your thriving Hollywood career, you often return to Denmark to make films at home. Any plans for a return in the near future?
Speaking of Thomas Vinterberg, we do have plans to do something together this year.
Can you tell me anything about that?
It’s a little bit more of an ensemble film. But I think that’s all I’m allowed to say, to be honest!
