Mads Mikkelsen – ‘Oh, That's Right. I'm This Guy.'

Mads Mikkelsen is known for playing villains in America and more nuanced roles in Denmark. He takes everything and nothing seriously.

- By E. Alex Jung

Before he became an actor, Mads Mikkelsen spent almost a decade as a dancer, a practice evident in the carriage of his characters. Each vibrates on his own frequency, a jittery drug dealer, a sweaty butcher, a pagan warrior, a

worldly cannibal. Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round features one of the rare moments in Mikkelsen’s filmography when he straight-up dances. His character, Martin, has the leaden tread of a man stuck in a midlife crisis. Throughout the film, his friends urge him to show off some moves for old time’s sake, and he resists until the final scene, an ecstatic burst of choreography that pops like a sea spray of Champagne. As an actor in Hollywood, Mikkelsen is better known for playing franchise villains—Casino Royale, Doctor Strange—but he’s perhaps too fast, too fun, to become a simple stock character. Closer to his native Denmark, where he is a star, his characters take on honeyed shades of darkness. As a celebrity, he has a touch of aloofness, as though he exists in his own world of pleasant amusement. “I’m rarely starstruck,” he says, chain-smoking in a green tracksuit at his home in Mallorca. “Maybe because what I’m doing has never been a dream of mine.”

Before you became an actor, you spent about a decade studying dance, including a stint in New York at the Martha Graham Dance Company. How long were you there?