MARRAKECH – Receiving a career achievement award at this year’s Marrakech International Film Festival (which ended this past weekend), Mads Mikkelsen (“Doctor Strange,” “Pusher”) would be the first to acknowledge that had he been born a girl, his acting career might not have been half as successful.
The former gymnast, dancer, and “Casino Royale” Bond villain, Mikkelsen, said one of the things he finds most frustrating in the film industry is gender inequality for actors.
“Maybe not so much in European films, but in Hollywood, I see so many fantastic women having a gap of 30 years in their acting careers,” he said. “It’s like, now you are 80, you can do it again. Even when women make films, they tend to make them about men. It’s like, why don’t you make some films with these incredible women? That puzzles me every time because there’s so much talent out there.”
Mikkelsen has returned recently to doing more films in his native Denmark, including Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round” and Nikolaj Arcel’s “The Promised Land,” which is Denmark’s Oscar hopeful this year. Where he films partly depends on what is on offer. But it’s increasingly about coming home.
“I kind of go where the most interesting project is, but it’s become more and more important to me to do Danish or European films because it’s my home, my stories, my language, and, working with friends, I can go further than with people I don’t know,” he said.
He’s a big fan of his regular collaborator Thomas Vinterberg (“The Hunt”), who he says is “comfortable” to work with and one of the few directors he has a relationship with that extends beyond work.
Mikkelsen is aging gracefully and sharp as a whistle, picking up on question threads and giving dapper answers as he chats film at La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech.
He might “love to be physical,” but he’s clearly very switched on. He got his start in dance in Goteborg, a major city for dance in Sweden? before switching to acting. Both careers moved fast for him.
“I don’t dance at all now,” he said. “I was in Goteborg for a year and dropped out, but I wanted to just start dancing. So I joined a dance group. I went to Martha Graham and did a lot of training there. It went fast for me in dance, and in acting too. But I had never seen theater before, and all of a sudden I was on the stage and it was magical. I wasn’t in love with the aesthetics of dance. I didn’t understand what a pirouette was telling me. What are you saying? There were other contemporary things that were much more energetic that I fell in love with.”
He studied acting at the Aarhus Theater School in Denmark before achieving overnight fame in the Emmy Award-winning TV series, “Unit 1.”
Of his approach to acting, he said: “The process varies a lot, and it does for most actors. We just got a lot of different teachers that said a lot of things, but when we left after four years, we had no idea what to do, so we learned by doing.”
He added: “One of my approaches is the script. How can we make it stronger and more brutal? I talked with the director. Then I have to find a couple of things with me to identify with in this character. Then I make them much bigger in me, then I throw away some of my own things.”
One thing he doesn’t do is carry a character with him.
“You can spend a lot of time in a certain emotion for a character,” he said. “But I can’t carry the character with me. I don’t ask my kids to call me that name. It can sound impressive for journalists to say he lived on a mountain for two years and didn’t talk to his kids, but maybe he’s a shit actor.”
He’s played some pretty dark characters, including Hannibal Lecter. Can he identify?
“Humans are not black or white,” he said. “It’s one of the things I like about ‘Taxi Driver.’ He’s not a likable character, but there’s something that Robert De Niro [playing an ex-marine and Vietnam vet] does that makes me curious enough to want to go on that journey with him.”
This interview took place at the Marrakech International Film Festival.
