Mads Mikkelsen: Hannibal star more than a big-time baddie

There’s more to Mads Mikkelsen than intense portrayals of big-time baddies.

Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter in the US TV series Hannibal.

Mads Mikkelsen has arranged to meet me at the flat where he’s staying in Windsor, but this scruffy doorway on the high street can’t be the place. This is Denmark’s leading actor, for heaven’s sake! Creator of lip-smacking baddies (Hannibal Lecter in the American TV series Hannibal, the evil banker Le Chiffre in Casino Royale), winner of best actor at Cannes in 2012 for The Hunt and soon to star in two mega-budget blockbusters, Marvel’s Doctor Strange and Star Wars: Rogue One. Surely a glitzier residence would be in order.

I’m about to press the bell when the door opens and Mikkelsen strides out. His clothes are as anonymous as his gaff: tracksuit, trainers, woolly hat, from which strands of greying hair protrude. The only obvious signs of stardom are the cheekbones.

This is a man who craves a low profile. Does he often get recognised here? “If I stop moving,” he says with a smile, so we speed-walk around the corner to an empty cafe. Mikkelsen has been living in Windsor for the past few months to be near the set of Doctor Strange, in which he plays a sorcerer and chief antagonist to Benedict Cumberbatch’s titular superhero. “It’s one of those teenage boys’ dreams come true,” he says in his fluent, slightly lisping English. “Magic and flying kung fu at the age of 50 — it’s not too bad.”

There’s lots of wire work and blue screens, which he loves, having learned the art of digital make-believe from one of his co-stars in Clash of the Titans (2010). “We were six Greek warriors attacking giant scorpions that weren’t there, but luckily we had Sam Worthington, who had just spent 2½ years doing Avatar, and he was just, ‘Argh!’ charging a tennis ball.”

Mikkelsen is also in the middle of making Rogue One, which is set before the events of the first Star Wars film and follows the rebel spies who steal the plans for the Death Star. Details are scarce and he is bound by confidentiality agreements, but he has been cast as the father of the lead character, played by Felicity Jones. He is admirably free of fanboy hysteria about the whole thing. Just as he had not seen a Bond film when he did Casino Royale, he was a Star Wars virgin for Rogue One. Were the producers surprised? “I hadn’t told them!”

Having since watched the most recent film, The Force Awakens, he admits to feeling “a little lost. I loved the film but it almost did not become its own film, it became a reference to a reference to a reference.” Is Rogue One similar? “No, because it’s set before all the other films.” It has been described as Vietnam in space. An enigmatic grin: “Sounds good to me.”

His performances are marked by intensity and a suave versatility — there’s a clip on YouTube of him speaking eight languages for his roles: English, Danish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Russian. Men & Chicken, his next film to be released, couldn’t be farther from Star Wars. A dark and twisted comedy from the Danish writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen, it’s about five violent, inbred brothers in rural Denmark who attempt to discover their grotesque origins. Hint: they’re not entirely human.

“The gear shift is important,” he says. “But it also goes the other way around — if you’ve done two deep dramas at home, you want to say: ‘Give me a sword, let me fly through the air.’ ”

Men & Chicken is one of several films he has made with the Oscar-winning Jensen, who has previously featured him as a priest with an absurd ruff collar (Adam’s Apples) and a butcher with a radically receding hairline (The Green Butchers). This time Mikkelsen has a harelip, prosthetic nose and greasy curls. It’s almost as if Jensen delights in sabotaging the looks of an actor voted the sexiest man in Denmark several times. “Anders has been a big part of killing that rumour,” he says. “I’ve always been looking slightly weird in his films.”

On its release in Denmark, Men & Chicken incurred the wrath of groups representing the elderly, chickens and even harelipped people. Mikkelsen is bemused by the reaction. “If that film was made 10 years ago we wouldn’t have had one complaint, but we were stormed by minority groups,” he says. “It was absolutely insane.” I’m not sure what the Danish is for “political correctness gone mad” but he’s clearly grasping for it.

It’s not the first time he has been indirectly involved in a media storm. Last year he starred in the controversial video for Rihanna’s Bitch Better Have My Money, playing the singer’s crooked accountant. The video was criticised because Rihanna and her tooled-up female friends spent most of it wreaking violent revenge not on Mikkelsen’s character but on his wife, played by the model Rachel Roberts. He looks aghast. “Oh God, did they come over all PC on that as well? Shouldn’t they put their energy on all the naked girls who aren’t doing anything in videos? I can’t take that seriously. There are minority groups everywhere that will say, ‘Oh my God, why am I not in the film? Oh my God, why am I in the film?’ ”

Mikkelsen was born and raised in Copenhagen, where he still lives. He is married to the choreographer Hanne Jacobsen, with whom he has two children: Viola, 23, and Carl, 18. His mother was a nurse, his father a bank clerk, and his older brother, Lars, is also an actor, best known for playing the politician Troels Hartmann in The Killing and the Russian president in House of Cards. Growing up, Mads says, “we never discussed the possibility of becoming actors”, but they loved watching films together, and practised English by memorising Monty Python sketches.

After training as a gymnast and dancer, he followed Lars to drama school, and went on to make his stage debut with his brother. The production, whose name he claims to have forgotten, was “absolute crap.

It was on an island and you had to leave afterwards on a boat with the audience, so you either had to do the walk of shame or hide in the front of the boat. We were supposed to run for two months but we lasted five nights.”

While Lars stayed in theatre, Mads moved into film, making his name in 1996 as a drug dealer in Pusher, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive). That gritty contemporary movie, he says, “was a major thing, not only for me but for the way we made films back home”. Before that, Danish cinema had been dominated by period dramas.

Since then, he has had a diverse mix of lead roles at home: a Norse warrior in Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising; a doctor who seduces the Danish queen in A Royal Affair; a man falsely accused of pedophilia in The Hunt. In Hollywood, like most Scandinavian actors, he’s generally been limited to villains and supporting roles. His part in Casino Royale, he says, “was a smaller one than I’d have said yes to back home but it was a bigger part than I could ever dream about having outside home”.

In 2010, Winding Refn said: “If no one else will give him the lead in a Hollywood movie, I will.” It hasn’t happened yet.

Contrast that with the progress of Alicia Vikander, Mikkelsen’s 27-year-old co-star in A Royal Affair, who has already played several leads in American films and won an Oscar. Is it easier for European women to make the jump to Hollywood? He shakes his head: “That’s because she’s talented and the camera loves her and she can jump back and forth with her accents.”

While the Hollywood marquee roles have eluded him, Mikkelsen achieved something that’s just as rare for a Dane — playing the lead in a major US TV series — when he was cast in NBC’s Hannibal. Some worried that his strong accent would deviate too far from the measured tones of Anthony Hopkins; Mikkelsen’s defence was that Lecter, according to the books, is from Lithuania.

NBC’s faith was repaid with a performance that was creepy, charismatic and critically acclaimed, and which caused Mikkelsen’s daughter to have a nightmare “about me chasing her with a knife”. Job done. Hopkins left “some fantastic big shoes to step into but luckily we were wearing different shoes. I’ve never regretted it, it’s some of my best work,” Mikkelsen says. And, he adds, a sign that things are “opening up a little” for non-American actors in the US. Perhaps the next flat will be glitzier.

The Times