Great Dane

Enigmatic Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen talks about his choice in roles

Last Updated: Friday, June 18, 2010 | 5:39 PM ET

By Martin Morrow, CBC News

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen displays his range in two new films, Valhalla Rising and Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. (Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images)

This story originally appeared during the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival.

There are two Mads Mikkelsens at TIFF this year. One is the lean, sinewy, tough-guy Mads, the one his friend, director Nicolas Winding Refn, calls “the Danish Steve McQueen.” That’s the Mads who plays a mute, man-killing brute in Refn’s moody Viking saga Valhalla Rising.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn calls actor Mads Mikkelsen “the Danish Steve McQueen."

Then there’s the other Mads: fine-featured, with a senstive mouth and warm brown eyes. He’s the one who stars as the great avant-garde Russian composer Stravinsky inCoco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (which opens June 25).

On the day of our chat, I was largely talking to the tough Mads. Clad in jeans and cowboy boots, Mikkelsen shuns our designated interview space in a Yorkville art gallery and instead wants to sit outside on a bench, where he can smoke. He pulls out his cigarettes, Camels, which apparently aren’t strong enough for his taste — he’s torn off the filters. When I ask him how hard he had to train for his vigorous role in Valhalla Rising, he says he didn’t.

“I was in shape. I’m normally in shape.” He pauses. “I starved myself a little, because we wanted that skinny prison look.”

The Danish-British co-production was shot almost entirely outdoors, on the rugged, rainy mountainsides of Scotland. “Beautiful, but the land of Mordor, as I call it,” Mikkelsen says with a laugh. The cast and crew would climb for an hour to a remote location, shoot for eight hours, then climb down again. As the mysterious fighter One-Eye, who kills his captors and embarks on an ill-fated crusade with a band of Christian Vikings, Mikkelsen spent his time half-naked, trudging through mud. “It was really tough conditions out there, and we were doing it every day, so it really took its toll in the end.”

Mikkelsen portrays One Eye, a mute fighter who joins an ill-fated Viking quest, in Valhalla Rising. (TIFF)

As soon as the film wrapped, he went straight to Paris to appear in director Jan Kounen’s stylish historical romance about Chanel and Stravinsky. “I looked so much forward to sit down, drink coffee in a scene and have a chat,” Mikkelsen recalls wistfully. “But it turned out to be one of the toughest jobs I’d ever done — again. I had to learn French and Russian and play piano in less than two weeks.” No, that’s not his playing on the film’s soundtrack, but he did have to learn enough to make his keyboard fingering look authentic.

It’s tempting to draw a connection between the two films. As One-Eye, he’s a pagan savage, a kind of primal force. As Stravinsky, he plays the man who brought savage, pagan music to the European concert hall with his scandalous ballet The Rite of Spring. Mikkelsen indulges my musings, but says there’s no practical correlation for an actor.

“One-Eye is not a person, he’s a myth or an animal,” he points out. “Stravinsky is very much a person, with the normal feelings and needs of being accepted by society.” The infamous 1913 Paris premiere of Rite, which provoked a riot in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, “was a big blow on him. He knew he was a genius, he’d made a masterpiece and he just didn’t understand why everybody else was not agreeing with him. He had to struggle with that for years.”

Now we’re talking to the sensitive Mads, the one that can just as easily portray an artist and lover. Kouen’s film opens with the Rite scandal, then moves ahead to 1920 when Stravinsky, now a Russian refugee with an ailing wife and four children, is befriended by wealthy fashion designer Chanel (Anna Mouglalis). Their mutual esthetic sympathies blossom into a torrid love affair. “This is something that we’re pretty sure happened,” Mikkelsen says, although the film, based on Chris Greenhalgh’s novel, takes dramatic license with the details.

Mikkelsen plays the Russian composer Stravinsky in Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinksy. (TIFF)

Mikkelsen, 43, has been a star in his native Denmark since the late 1990s, when he made his debut in Refn’s first feature, the drug-dealing thriller Pusher, a hit that spawned two sequels. He first came to the attention of North American audiences as Le Chiffre, the card sharp nemesis of Daniel Craig’s James Bond, in 2006’s Casino Royale. Sitting across the card table, daubing his bleeding eye, he brought a sinister creepiness back to the Bond baddies. However, it was in last year’s Danish blockbuster Flame and Citron that Mikkelsen revealed his impressive range, playing a gentle family man and reluctant Resistance fighter who winds up a cold-blooded killing machine.

One would like to see more of that range, but we may have to wait. Mikkelsen’s next movie is a remake of Clash of the Titans, an all-star, FX-heavy telling of the Perseus myth, in which he plays Draco. “That was another long-haired, full-blooded guy, a classical Greek warrior,” Mikkelsen says. The part involved a lot of blue-screen work, in which he battled invisible giant scorpions and krakens that were later added via computer. Mikkelsen says acting with imaginary monsters is not his favourite way of working, but he doesn’t mind it.

“It’s always easier to have something there, something or someone you can act to, it goes without saying. But after a while, you find a way of doing it. And it’s really hard to find those big scorpions these days.”

Then there’s the film he’ll be making this fall, a mafia thriller starring Harvey Keitel, in which Mikkelsen will portray a Russian mobster. It’s the first picture Mikkelsen has made in Canada, with shooting to begin in Winnipeg in October. The thought of spending a winter in Winnipeg doesn’t faze him. “I’m from Denmark,” he smiles. “I will like it.”

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky opens on June 25.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.