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Danish star Mads Mikkelsen has made movies in five different languages, with a double career in Europe and in Hollywood, but he can’t be put in a box. He’s played everything from franchise villain to romantic lead to comedy hero. Then there’s his upcoming movie, Dust Bunny, to be released later this year …

From the Danish coast north of Copenhagen, you can clearly see Sweden on a bright day. It’s only five miles away and there’s a bridge to take you there. That’s where Mads Mikkelsen now lives, near the town of Charlottenlund. The Danish star, known for intense performances as both leading man and villain, enjoys a life removed from the heart of the city, frequently going for walks in the nearby forest. That is, when he’s not in Majorca, Spain, during the winter months. At the same time, Mads is on the move, down to the way he dresses. When I meet him, he’s wearing a brightly coloured track suit. Photographer Charlie Gray, who’s worked with him several times, tells me that Mads can talk your ear off about Premier League games. He’s obsessed with sports, ready to join “any basketball game that will have me.”

When planning for the photo shoot, we’d noticed a large green boat moored in a remote area of the nearby harbour. It looks like the boat from the famous Danish comic-book series Rasmus Klump, also known as Petzi in some European countries. Mads and that little bear are probably the most famous contemporary Danish icons, so joining them, in a way, makes total sense! The boat owners, a world-travelling couple in their mid-sixties, were excited to have Mads visit their boat. “We had the boat custom-built in the Netherlands with 40 tons of steel,” they tell us. It turned out the owner was a movie producer who had produced Mads’ first movie! It seems true that everybody knows everybody in Denmark.

Preparing for this story, I’ve been wondering how Mads got the acting bug. Mads Mikkelsen’s older brother, Lars, is also a fantastic actor, most recently seen playing Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Star Wars series “Ahsoka”. Is there something in the Mikkelsen family that fosters great actors? It wasn’t always in the cards for Mads to act. He started out as a gymnast. He competed at a junior level, sometimes hiding that fact from his street- tough friends for fear of being mocked. He then became a dancer, and that was his profession for ten years.

“My brother graduated from drama school a year before I entered one,” he remembers. “But it was kind of in the cards that I might do the swap eventually. I really loved dancing. I thought it was fantastic. But I was more in love with the drama of dancing than aesthetics of dancing. Once in a while, we had a choreographer who did something I found super-dramatic and I just felt very much alive in that. Doing something that was, like, everybody’s doing something in unison could be fun, but it felt a little too classic to me. So even though I loved dancing, I knew that was more in love with drama. Eventually, I was gonna give it a shot. The timing was just that I did it a year after my brother.” One wonders if there was ever some competition between the two brothers, especially considering they both appeared in Star Wars fictions, Mads in the movie Star Wars: Rogue One playing a good guy, and Lars in the TV series “Ahsoka” playing a baddie. “There isn’t a rivalry between us,” he laughs. “There will always be a friendly competition between siblings. We’re quite different as people and we also focus on different things. I do love the theatre, but I am more in love with films, and I think it has been a little reversed with my brother: he is more in love with the theatre. But he does films and loves it. So, I think we approached things quite differently. There’s rarely been a comparison. We’ve rarely been fighting over the same part. We’ve done a few things together. Unfortunately, not enough. It would be great to do more.”

Mads Mikkelsen became known in Denmark for his very first film, Pusher, part of the Pusher trilogy (Mads also plays in Pusher II), directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. In it he plays Tony, the sidekick of a low-level drug dealer. The film was considered the first Danish-language gangster film and was a worldwide success, launching Mads’ career. “Denmark came on the map in the mid-90s in terms of filmmaking, and that’s when I started,” he reflects. “People from other countries started to look at our films and to make calls to Denmark!”

“I really loved dancing. I thought it was fantastic. But I was more in love with the drama of dancing than the aesthetics of dancing.”

It’s quite an unusual debut for an actor. But Mads was no stranger to the Copenhagen neighborhood where the story takes place. “That was my hood, that’s where I grew up,” he explains. “It came in handy, in the sense that the director was not familiar with it. He was very much from another social class, if you see what I mean. He was a middle-class guy, he’d been to New York, he lived there. But he had a certain drive about him that he wanted to tell his story taking place in this environment. And he was very open, asking us to interpret it for him because he blankly said, ‘This is not my area, this is not my place, you guys help me, I just want to bring this story to life.’ So he chose to leave only three actors in the film – the rest of the characters are people from the hood, real criminals, real drug addicts, et cetera – it was kind of a mixture, which he’s always been fond of doing. It became like, ‘Let’s go rock and roll!’ We did not have a lot of money. Let’s shoot a film! And that’s how we did it.”

From Pusher to last year’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, there’s quite a gap – nearly 30 years of acting in five different languages, including playing a villain in a couple of James Bond movies. In the new Indiana Jones, he plays Nazi scientist Jürgen Voller. I wondered if it was easy for Mads, a Danish man, to play a German Nazi. Mads, ever the practical guy, took a bird’s eye view of his role in the movie. “The Nazis in Indiana Jones films are mainly there for Harrison to punch the shit out of them,” he laughs. “He wants to make the world a better place. He doesn’t consider himself a bad guy, he considers himself a hero of his own world.”

What’s remarkable about Mikkelsen’s career is that he could move to Hollywood and only play in American movies, certainly a very lucrative career, but he insists on alternating between Hollywood and Danish cinema. His new movie The Promised Land, an epic historical drama written and directed by the Danish Nikolaj Arcel, sees him play Ludvig Kahlen, a retired veteran soldier with a modest pension living on a farm in the Jutland peninsula. “He’s a guy who tries to grow potatoes on a very barren land – he was a pioneer of Danish agriculture,” explains Mads. This time, Mads is the hero. But it doesn’t mean he likes everything about his character. “He frustrates me with his choices,” he says. “To be so stubborn and ready to destroy everything around you, even what you love, to reach your goal, that’s fascinating. He comes from nothing but wants to be part of something he hates, nobility. In the end, it’s about embracing what’s in front of you, that you sometimes don’t see.” It’s quite an unusual film for Scandinavian cinema, and it was recently chosen as the Danish entry to the Academy Awards, competing in the Best Foreign Film category for an Oscar. “We very rarely make films like this in Denmark anymore,” he says. “We come from the school of kitchen-sink drama. It’s an epic, with a lot of surprises, but it’s still centred on the characters.”

Surprising – maybe that’s the best way to describe Mads Mikkelsen’s career, playing an incredibly wide variety of roles across time and space. It also extends to his personal life. There’s a side of Mads people may not be familiar with: Mads the family man. I unexpectedly had the opportunity to witness that hidden side of him. As we continued our conversation over the phone, we were suddenly interrupted by a baby crying. “Sorry, it’s my granddaughter,” he tells me. I was taken aback at the thought of Mikkelsen, still in his mid-fifties and very active, as a grandfather. His daughter Viola had given birth to a baby girl earlier this year, Maria. “It’s better to be a young grandpa,” he explains, thinking practically. “Then you can still run around with the grandkids.”

They say that great acting is through the eyes, and time and again, Mads Mikkelsen has demonstrated this in his work. It’s also clear that he doesn’t take his success for granted. In fact, he’s still somewhat in disbelief. “It’s been a fantastic ride, and I’m surprised it happened!”

@theofficialmads

PHOTOGRAPHER: CHARLIE GRAY
STYLIST: JAY HINES
GROOMING: INGEBORG WOLF
PRODUCTION: COOL HUNT INC.
SPECIAL THANKS: SKOVSHOVED HOTEL