There is no one Mads Mikkelsen fan, says Mads Mikkelsen, matter-of-factly.
He goes through them, one by one. There are the mature men who know him from Casino Royale: “distinguished older gentlemen who probably wouldn’t say hi if they saw me in the street” but are happy to queue for an autograph, “standing patiently in line like, ‘Do you mind, sir?’”
Then there are the fans of the NBC prestige drama Hannibal, in which Mikkelsen made Dr Lecter an unlikely figure of lust. “The hardcore Fannibals, that’s a different world,” he says. “There can be some Beatles screaming.”
Mikkelsen intersects many of the biggest franchises of the past 50 years: Bond, Star Wars, Marvel, and now, Harry Potter. Mikkelsen has replaced Johnny Depp as Gellert Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. And that’s just in Hollywood. In his native Denmark, he has been said to be a figure of national pride on a par with the football team. Not that he lets on.
Mikkelsen is unfazed by the intensity of feeling for him. “Those kinds of roles will do it,” he says. “And that’s fine with me, if that one thing can unite people.” We meet the day after Fantastic Beasts’ red-carpet premiere in London, at a tiny table at the back of the brasserie of the Rosewood Hotel.
In person he is confident and outspoken, inclined to dig into disagreement and look for the joke, not least at his own expense. Then there’s his looks: handsome, of course, but it is more a kind of magnetism. You could watch his face for hours and still be finding new things in it. He’s a rare franchise mainstay who can disappear into roles in smaller projects – from a knife-wielding skinhead in Nicolas Winding Refn’s thriller Pusher, to a schoolteacher suffering a midlife slump in the Oscar-winning Another Round. Best known for playing taciturn villains and awkward misfits, he imbues them with depth, texture and surprise, bringing emotional vulnerability even to Hannibal Lecter – often while seeming to be doing very little. The sum of his parts is a reputation to be reckoned with: as “a genuinely captivating actor,” to quote one critic and paraphrase many others, who audiences find mesmerising to watch and easy to get behind.
Even Depp’s supporters rallying online about Depp's ousting from the project (after allegations that Depp had physically and verbally abused his ex-wife Amber Heard) rallying online often clarify: no hard feelings, Mads. It is easy to see why Mikkelsen was reportedly Fantastic Beasts director David Yates’ first choice. He was approached days after Depp lost his libel trial (against The Sun newspaper, for calling him a “wife beater”) and was pushed by Warner Brothers to resign.
Mikkelsen remembers the urgency. “Obviously there was a situation that had to be solved overnight…They were just panicking.” Smartly dressed in layers of black, his six-foot-then-some bulk inclined and at ease despite his little chair, Mikkelsen says it like someone who has never panicked in his life.
Early reviews for The Secrets of Dumbledore have agreed that it is an improvement on the earlier Fantastic Beasts films, with many singling out Mikkelsen’s performance as Gellert Grindelwald, the dark wizard agitating for war against non-magical Muggles.
Where Depp was unreadable behind his wild eye and cartoonish steampunk style – “like he’s been dipped in flour,” one reviewer put it – Mikkelsen’s villain is steady and implacable in his fascistic pursuit of power, and believably bruised as Albus Dumbledore’s first love. The difference is rather like that between Depp’s Willy Wonka, and Gene Wilder’s: more human – and with it more unnerving.
Mikkelsen himself sees his Grindelwald as an extension of Depp’s character, not a reset. He likens it to following Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter: “To copy him would be creative suicide…We had to make it our own.” He retained the intellectual vanity Depp brought to the character, but made his Grindelwald more respectable and empathetic – in part to suggest what someone so purely good as Dumbledore might have once seen in him.
Fans may be disappointed that, 15 years after being outed by his creator, Dumbledore is still denied an on-screen kiss – but Fantastic Beasts 3 does advance on the glancing earlier characterisation of his relationship with Grindelwald as “closer than brothers,” leaving no doubt that they were lovers. Much of that is down to the humanity of Mikkelsen’s performance and his chemistry with Jude Law as Dumbledore; both clearly commit to the romance insofar as the script allows, or demands.
The nuance to that dynamic, between two people with a “beautiful and brutal past,” appealed to Mikkelsen when he first read the script. Warner Brothers’ schedule did not allow for revisions: “If I’d thought it was just completely falling apart as a story, I would have said no.” But, he says, “There was a subtlety to what they were trying to do, especially with that relationship…They definitely like each other – and they definitely have to get rid of each other.”
Mikkelsen had already been under pressure to say yes from his daughter Viola, 30, a Harry Potter fan since childhood, just as his son Carl, 25, pushed him to appear as the titular “Bitch” in Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” video (“he had a little crush,” Mikkelsen says).
But the external pressure on him to rescue a franchise deemed “doomed” by the press, he found easy to dismiss. “There’s so much pressure,” he says with a shrug. “If you started listening to everything, you wouldn’t dare to take one step.”
We compare it to Daniel Craig, criticised as Bond before he even began. “Unless he closed his eyes, he was being bombarded, morning and evening, by the newspapers: ‘He sucks’, ‘he’s blonde’, ‘look at his nose’. It was insane: ‘the Crown Jewels of English film.’” Mikkelsen scoffs, with marvellous Scandi disdain. “And then he nailed it completely – and everything turned.”
He only learned recently how apprehensive Craig had been. “It did not come across at all…He focused, and he went into work. That’s the only thing you can do – and it’s the same for us.”
Mads Mikkelsen grew up in Østerbro in working-class Copenhagen, the son of a nurse and a banker. As a kid he was fast and small, with a big mouth. He liked to wind up the bigger boys, “then I’d have an escape route, which was just that they couldn’t catch me…Like, ‘Okay, I’ve agitated him enough. Time to run!’”
He was sports mad, competing in handball and gymnastics, through which he came to study dance for 10 years. More than the aesthetics, he found, he liked the drama – the “story that I could relate to, that would make me jump in a different way, more aggressive or soft”. And though he didn’t crave the limelight, he didn’t shy from it.
It was a natural step to applying for drama school. Mikkelsen spent four years studying theatre before falling into film with Refn’s Pusher in 1996. “I was always one of those actors who instead of going to the back row, with my voice or my energy, I would try to invite them up to me, make them curious: ‘Come up to me, and see what I have to say.’”
Mikkelsen already had a credible career as a leading man in Denmark when, at 41, he shot to fame playing Le Chiffre. He credits his later-in-life arrival in Hollywood with inoculating him against the industry’s big egos – though there are fewer than you might think, he adds. Word travels fast of bad behaviour: “Everybody tries their best not to be a diva, they go the extra mile to be the nicest people – it becomes too much, sometimes,” he says wryly. “You would probably find more assholes driving buses.”
Mikkelsen has said he can be “fairly annoying to work with” in his rejection of compromise. In his Danish films in particular, more open to collaboration, he often pushes himself and his collaborators to achieve something “radical. There are certain films that are not there to offend anyone, those films where people get a little sad and also a little happy,” he says, his dismissiveness clear. “Like, okay, that’s cool. But if this is a drama that we want to touch something – I want to see them hurt themselves a lot, I want to see them be devastated.”
The commitment with which Mikkelsen approaches his roles does not extend to going method. He does not watch Succession and was not aware of the reported revival led by Jeremy Strong and Lady Gaga (who says she didn’t break character for the entirety of the House of Gucci production) – but his response is immediate: “It’s bullshit.”
He is meticulous in preparing for roles, learning to ride horses and wield swords for King Arthur, his first English-language blockbuster back in 2004, and to speak French for Age of Uprising in 2013. “But preparation, you can take into insanity,” he says. “What if it’s a shit film – what do you think you achieved? Am I impressed that you didn’t drop character? You should have dropped it from the beginning! How do you prepare for a serial killer? You gonna spend two years checking it out?”
He is clearly tickled by the idea of appearing alongside a dedicated method actor like Daniel Day-Lewis: “I would have the time of my life, just breaking down the character constantly.” He puts on a prissy voice: “‘I’m having a cigarette? This is from 2020, it’s not from 1870 – can you live with it?’ It’s just pretentious,” he adds, impatient again. “Daniel Day-Lewis is a great actor. But it’s got nothing to do with this.”
Mikkelsen blames breathless praise from the press, conflating stunts with skill: “The media goes, ‘Oh my god, he took it so seriously, therefore he must be fantastic; let’s give him an award.’ Then that’s the talk, and everybody knows about it, and it becomes a thing.”
It is obvious that Mikkelsen feels a deep aversion to the febrile cycle of outrage and adulation by which contemporary culture turns. “People get cancelled right and left, and some of it’s true and some of it’s not…The times are insane,” he says with dismay. “It’s as if everybody’s looking for a controversy.”
He has no comment to make on Depp, or his 29-year-old co-star Ezra Miller’s recent disorderly conduct and harassment charge in Hawaii. The contested legacy of Harry Potter and its creator is trickier to pass over.
Since mid-2020, Rowling has been increasingly outspoken with views on feminism, sex and gender that have been widely condemned as transphobic. Daniel Radcliffe, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, Katherine Waterston and other members of the Wizarding World casts have publicly disagreed with Rowling, while many LGBTQI people and allies are calling for a boycott of Fantastic Beasts (of which Rowling is credited as writer and producer).
Mikkelsen is wary of judging Rowling for her views: “People treat it a little flippantly, like, ‘Isn’t that a disgrace?’ And every time you ask somebody, you can’t really figure out what she said. But if the reaction is that crazy, we have to be very careful that we know what we’re talking about.”
But, he emphasises, he has not read Rowling’s 5000-word blog, and is not familiar with her views. “I have a habit of not commenting on things that I don’t know anything about, and I actually think that that would suit the entire world.”
“I don’t know what the solution is,” he says. “No hateful rhetoric towards either women or trans [people] – that’s a good start. But we have to be honest – and it seems to me, when you turn science into ideology, and politics into science, then you’re not talking from an honest place. And I think that’s muddying the waters regarding what side you’re on, and rarely leads to anywhere good.”
The path through, Mikkelsen says, is “adult conversation” – but he worries that it is increasingly hard to have. He avoids social media, “first of all because I suck at it” but also because of the polarised, angry debate. “It’s as if we want to have either-or…If that gap becomes too big, then we just stop talking.”
It brings to mind the nuance that Mikkelsen looks for in his scripts. In 2012, he won Best Actor at Cannes for The Hunt, directed by Thomas Vinterberg, in which he plays a kindergarten teacher falsely accused of molesting a child. The incremental misunderstandings, and every character’s motivation are clear – but that does not make the outcome any less devastating, or brutal.
That subtlety does not necessarily translate across markets: in the US, Mikkelsen tells me, The Hunt was widely regarded as a thriller, his character’s guilt speculated over though the film is explicit about his innocence. “In my world, there’s no discussion: it’s a film about a man who didn’t do it,” he says.
The Hunt might not have been made in today’s “culture of debate,” he suggests. “There’s just this desire now to make everything political – everything, every film you make,” he says, exasperation mounting. “You’re always being asked: ‘Is this a comment on this?’ No, it’s not!” He chuckles, but not without frustration.
“There is such a thing that is more interesting: human beings, human souls, human interactions.” And those, Mikkelsen adds, are rarely clear cut. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to make a film that has this side, and that side.”
His more recent collaboration with Vinterberg, Another Round – about a group of middle-aged friends setting out to recapture their lust for life by being a tiny bit drunk, all of the time – likewise resisted easy conclusions. As well as for Mikkelsen’s epic, life-affirming dance at its end, deploying decades-old chops (he was “insanely rusty,” he has said), it was notable for its evenhanded depiction of alcohol.
Now, despite its global success, winning best international feature at last year’s Oscars, Another Round is set for a US remake, with Leonardo DiCaprio tipped for the lead. “Give it a shot,” Mikkelsen says, adding that the particular culture it depicts is very Danish. “You can feel that they will make it into more of a comedy, or…” he wags his finger “‘the dangers of alcohol’: a moral film. But I don’t mind at all,” he adds. “If they want to invite me to be an English teacher with a funny accent, I’ll do it.”
It speaks to Mikkelsen’s ability to go back and forth between leading man and character actor, blockbuster and independent, home and away. (He and his wife Hanne Jacobsen divide their time between Copenhagen and Mallorca.)
He believes he is committed to the future of Fantastic Beasts: “I think I am. I’m not sure how that works. I guess if they want me to finish the job, they need Grindelwald back.” Of course, he’s also got Indiana Jones 5, alongside Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, due out mid next year.
But Mikkelsen never looks too far ahead, or back. He says he realised in doing press for Another Round, about a man who feels left behind by life, that he has always found it easy to live in the moment. Interviewers would ask him if acting in Bond and Star Wars had been a dream of his – and he could truthfully say no.
“I’m very ambitious when I do the actual work,” Mikkelsen says. ”I want to nail it, I want to make it right: ‘I want it to be more artful’, ‘Let’s do it a little more brutal’.” But he has no ambitions for his career. “Make every stepping stone the most important thing in your life,” he says. “That means everything you do is going to be the last and the best thing.”
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is out now.
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