Mads Mikkelsen Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

race race 12 million heads up everybody knew how to play poker actually around that table except for one Daniel he had no clue he sucked right I'm a mess migelson and these are some of my iconic characters some people tell me [Music] Casino Royale [Music] weeping blood comes merely from an arrangement of the tear duct of my dear gentlemen nothing sinister that was one of the things that the director actually insisted on because a real Bond villain has something got golden teeth or an extra nibble or something so so he went for the eye thing Daniel Craig and iron and Martin Campbell we had a lot of ideas Daniel came straight from like indie films smaller films and I also had my background in The Pusher films we discussed among other things that the big torture scene and we went down Rabbit Hole me and Daniel we had so many ideas and it was getting crazier and crazy and you could just see marching going guys guys come back it's it's a Bond film oh yeah you're right sorry but he was quite open to to look and experiment with the parameters of what you can do in the platform I suppose our friends Mr White would have told you that I have provided reliable banking services for many other Freedom Fighters over the years do you believe in God I Believe In a reasonable rate of return he's a he's a normal person he's not taking over the world he's not one of those guys he's any funny money and if Bond didn't bump into his way they would never have met it's not that he he's after anyone so obviously he's vulnerable there's people above him people who are used to violence in a different way than he is and it's a different kind of villain that's for sure I played a lot of Poker since I was a kid so so the game was not new to me the hands we are playing are insane you know so if you're a poker player you'll go but we just wanted to make the the nature of the betting uh believable but the hands obviously had to be easily recognizable for an audience that doesn't play poker so they were quite crazy hands but uh yeah everybody knew how to play poker actually around that table except for one Daniel he had no clue he sucked and it was like it was the worst thing ever that he of all people had to beat me and win all my money it was like this is wrong well I got him back with the Rope so that's good [Music] Doctor Strange for well beyond time because time is what enslaves this time it's an insult death is an insult that was like some Glam Rock from the 70s just coming up there it looked good took forever to be sitting three hours in that chair every morning we cut it down eventually but in the beginning it was very elaborate I think we ended up maybe an hour and 45 but it was still a long time right and it was annoying uh it was just annoying to be wearing that but luckily I wasn't the only one you can feel a little weird if you're the only one doing it I had a whole gang of resealots doing the same [Music] thank you [Music] when you're in action film you do one or two stunts and I I'm not the worst in the world to do stunts I'm a former gymnast and a dancer so I'm pretty good at it so I get a little disappointed like I did little in in the Bond film when I realized the biggest star that was doing in that film was to fold two Aces it was like this is not right do they know how good I am of this can I get a chopper scene wet you know somebody got fulfilled it in a with flying Kung Fu and wise and stuff it was it was really fun to be part of Bruce Lee it's hot in my generation was very hard not to be when you were like a working class kid that was like that was him you know him and Pastor Keith and were unrelated though but I can see now I I fell for both of them they have something in common they have a certain presence and and they have a minimalistic way of doing things that you know Buster Keaton could do very little things and all of a sudden the sky would just open right and so I've always been fascinated by that without putting my finger on wire and why I was fascinating the Indiana Jones and the dial of Destiny and with this I will correct them all you stole it then you stole it everybody wanted their hands from the on the breeding sciences that was working for the Nazis and everybody was agreeing that they should just shut their eyes and not talk about it I'm a history Buffet I know quite a bit about that part I also know that there was not only in the states that these things happened it happened in obviously in the Soviet Union to a degree in UK as well so we did look at a lot of photos of vanophen brown in particular and it was interesting to see you know that it has a certain dandiness around him he had a little curve in his hair cool glasses and he was just walking around you know people and working with Americans as if there was no past and that's shocking but it's also it's also interesting to see that with with what kind of an ease that they just transformed from that period to the next that we met my memories are you still a Nazi I think I remember the most obviously working with these fantastic people and working with Edward Harrison of course is the top thing I mean normally he would just see me wherever I was randomly far away and he would screamed that goes the Nazi right okay thanks Harrison that would be like an entire new crew who didn't know the story and everybody thought it was a Nazi great so that was his way of warming up and I I liked it he's a teenager he needs energy and everything about him he's a legend for on some so many levels right for his talent for the stuff he's done but he's predominantly in my world a legend because she doesn't behave like a legend he just brings everything down to earth and makes everybody comfortable around him and so we can make and create a scene Networks Hannibal before we begin you must all be warned nothing here is vegetarian Hannibal is a very different animal he can be impulsive but really it's a choice if he does it he's in complete complete control he sees the world differently than we do he's like a fallen angel it just sees the opposite he sees love where we see something horrifying he sees Beauty when we see something very very ugly for him life is most interesting and most fantastic when it's on the threshold to death right in that moment There's Something Beautiful happening in his world so that's obviously a Corey way of thinking but I don't necessarily have to go down that path I can just substitute with something else that I find beautiful you know something I I cherish and I think that's the best way to approach it as to as opposed to go down in a dark alley then go down in a beautiful alley that's what he's doing he's way too intelligence for anyone I have no idea how he learned all these languages and how to cook play the cinnamon and shoot bow and arrow to Perfection everything it's like he's a lifter character right now and for some reason he never got rid of his funny accent he didn't have time for that [Music] I did it at all yeah it's only doing stuff flipping and catching an egg there and so that's a lot of juggling in that which I'm fairly good at myself there was things that I didn't know why I did in the beginning and then it makes sense later like it's supposed to when he sniffs wine like everybody else goes like that he goes like just away from him and then I think it just needed to be interesting to be honest it was just something that's like that's weird he's doing that let's just do it for fun and then he realized it does make sense his nose is so sensitive it has to be all the way out here right [Music] did you just smell me difficult to avoid so we didn't want him to be a classical psychopath if that's the case then we're gonna dive into his past what happened to him oh there was something and it becomes a banale story about oh that could have been solved early on but we kind of didn't like the idea of understanding his path we just want him to be this and not a classical psychopath we want him to be a man with emotions and with empathy but unlike the other character the main character of the show Will Graham who has no control of his empathy he's just too much of that Hannibal's complete control went to him when to have it and when to give it people they're like yin yang situation right and that was the whole idea about the show that they would circle around it eventually something had to happen and since I did [Music] foreign it was a frustrating read it was immaculate it was beautiful but it was also very frustrating to read it because obviously I had this sensation of a man who was just cornered from everywhere and it was nothing he could hit there was no one he could hit he couldn't do anything and that's exactly what we set out to do I think that's one of the reasons why he's a very powerful film so what's important for us that she felt comfortable and so whatever we did didn't rub off on her because somehow she had to run around in that world a little Innocent but also know just enough what the film was about so I spent a lot of time with her which was fun and made me forget the situation even though it's quite a heron experience to watch the film they shouldn't they shouldn't really have the the knowledge of what we're doing in that sense I've always found it like um an interesting way for an actor to forget himself in a scene we can start overthinking stuff but if we just hang in there with whatever the kid is doing and just kind of Follow that energy we tend to become better actors as well Rogue one if I took my own life it will only be a matter of time before credit realized he no longer needed me to complete the project so I did the one thing nobody expected I lied I made myself indispensable and all the while I laid the groundworker for my revenge we call it the Death Star Arissa wasn't evil he started out with good intentions and then somebody took it away out in Star Wars I created the Death Star boom yeah I just did that and then working with Felicity it was it was an interesting because it was going back and forth in time quite a bit and he said goodbye to his daughter when she was very little no knowledge of where she went and she had no knowledge of who he was or was she on the dark side or on the good side so that was quite a dilemma for them when they met up again I've seen your message it must be destroyed I know I know we will okay [Music] look at you it becomes very technical when you do it for three days in a row because there was so much involved with rain and rain very hard to keep your eyes open when the range was pouring out so I mean obviously you just you look at her and you you see over the first time in 20 years and that's the same moment where you have to say goodbye to her again which is quite emotional and and then before we get a chance you're gone so you try to play the situation you can't really plan for it and sometimes it goes in One Direction sometimes in a different but when you were with a fantastic actress like Felicity it helps a lot another round um this is a film about the levels of alcohol intake quite early decided that's not gonna We're not gonna drink on set because we do know what it is to be drunk but we were curious about the levels did we haven't correct or not like 0.05 0.07 what happens so we did a little boot camp where we tested out the different levels and we acted out in one specific scene and we've repeated that again and again on different levels and it was quite clear that after a certain amount that that was no communication with the director anymore it was just for kids talking and nobody listening [Music] [Applause] and you get Freer and Freer and then a little too free and then back again so all these things were very important for us to I mean we could obviously react it and we guessed a lot of it but we also it was nice to have had that boot camp because there were there was things that were super clear to us when we watched it but when you were in the midst of it that you had no awareness of like hands all of a sudden they get their own life let's say you have to fall for beers all of a sudden they just have their own life and you don't feel it everybody told me that he was the Godfather of that Universe he was trying to pitch it to us more than once and we're both like I think I'm I think I got it but she would just do the scene and you can take over from there because there was so many layers in it and when he was explaining it Norman I just did our best to not at the right place and say we got it let's move on yeah I'm I'm not even gone through 10 of it I have no idea how to play that game like that again we've dressed up in uh in a green bodysuit we wear dots everywhere and we had wearing a camera and luckily I wasn't the only one there was more people like that so would you do feel kind of ridiculous running around doing that but his world is so so crazy everything was animated he had a gigantic wall he's been doing all the drawings of what he was going to look like and it's just the world you have to just trust him he says we did scenes but they could also move a little and and then he will always fix it later he would always he's one of these directors that was like just so grateful for everything with it like even if we bummed our heads together I was like can we do it again and he was no it was great we can fix it later and we kept forgetting that it was animated thing right [Music] push it finally Plastic Man says she was telling me the secret spot s man you push a trial you use a film about Copenhagen it's about beyond the belly of Copenhagen which where I grew up and the director did not want any actress in his film he was one of these guys was like everything was standing and I know the producer said you fine you've got to have at least two actors in this one because it's going to be too much of a handful for you you couldn't find any uh and he kept casting he just didn't like it the other world too much theater in them and so and I was in drama school and somebody said you could take a look at this guy because nobody understands what he's saying he's just from that area of Copenhagen and he mumbles he's fast and and he liked what he saw so I got the job it was very rock and roll and he deliberately asked us to help give birth to this this film he knew what the story was about he wanted to capture it but he didn't know the universe he didn't come from there at all so that was cool for us so we were two actors running around with a lot of criminals shooting a film that was a on a piece of paper that energy of making films in that specific manner has always kept with me you can't do it on every single film that would be disaster to do it with a Indiana Jones film but the pureness and the cleanness of it uh I think is is worth bringing to every film if you can't in one dimension or another so it's it's what I grew up with and I will always cherish it I think it was just a little rock and rolly and like that would be fun that would be cool let's put respect in the back of his head and I don't think I was so super aware that that respect was ironic in the sense that there was no respect for this character whatsoever it was a tricky thing to go back to a character that was so annoying I mean he was just very annoying to be around also for me it was a part of me that was like we don't really want to do that you know but then shave your head and you got the tattoo and it's just like I like him he's such an idiot let's go [Music] well hello rise no I couldn't see anything it was not see-through it's just a prosthetic and it was super annoying for a lot of reasons I mean we were in Scotland so it's either was raining constantly or it was just baking Sunshine but when it was bacon Sunshine they had all these bushes in the in the mountains out full of little animals called michies like little biting kind of mosquitoes but with jaws and it was billions of them sometimes they they got caught inside my eye when we when we did the prosthetic onset so I would have like five or six little animals trying to eat me inside the eye and I was constantly going trying to kill him yeah and there was a pain it was a pain in the air he talks who one eye what's he saying that was again one of these things where it's like it's hot because he was like in between a real person or he was like kind of a myth we realized really fast that little normal things that people do scratch themselves or or fast movement reacting to something that he could we couldn't really because we lost some something interesting about character so we would actually restart the first two days when we realized that so we we went for more for like and this is going to sound pretentious because I never do this normally but we did go for an animal this time we did go for a like a big gorilla in a cave that that doesn't move like that it's just basically he knows what's happening and when he moves his head it is very slow and that that we played around with a little but we took away all the little fiddly things that normal people do it's a strange film uh it started like one thing on the on the paper and and it changed a lot once we came up there this is one of the things that Nicholas also did to push your films he can flip on a dime because like I hate Vikings let's do something else you know and that's what we did so we we made a painting or piece of music within the world of filmmaking better have my money I was there for two days I think that's the only time I ever shot in in America all the American films I've done have been shot in Europe so thanks Rihanna thanks Rihanna I finally got to shooting in America yeah I don't know how it landed I'm she must have seen I never asked her she must have seen something I've done I believe of something dangerous actually she called my agent and it's like do you want to be in a Rihanna film and I was like yeah I'll respect Rihanna I'm I I'm not picking in music so obviously I kind of replace it and then I heard some music oh yeah she's cool my son for the first time I think was impressed with what I do he wanted to to come with me on set and it's like young teenager I don't think so when she was so sweet and then she's so good and it became a really crazy video it didn't like the the push of things in the sense that there was a story I think we shot 10 of that story because it went in all kind of crazy directions all of a sudden so it became more like um an idea of this as opposed to a solid clean story and so it was very visual but yeah I'm pretty proud of being her that's fine

Channel: GQ

Views: 3,055,007

Keywords: casino royale, celebrity, dial of destiny, films, gq, gq iconic, gq iconic characters, gq magazine, hannibal, iconic, iconic characters, indiana jones, indiana jones 2023, indiana jones 5, indiana jones and the dial of destiny, indiana jones interview, indiana jones movie, mads, mads mikkelsen, mads mikkelsen casino royale, mads mikkelsen gq, mads mikkelsen hannibal, mads mikkelsen interview, mads mikkelsen star wars, movies, new indiana jones, the dial of destiny

Id: DtXC6Tu5p0M

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2023