![]() Mikkelsen already had a credible career as a leading man in Denmark when, at 41, he shot to fame playing Le Chiffre. “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 spent four years studying theatre before falling into film with Refn’s Pusher in 1996. It was a natural step to applying for drama school. And though he didn’t crave the limelight, he didn’t shy from it. ![]() 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”. He was sports mad, competing in handball and gymnastics, through which he came to study dance for 10 years. ![]() That’s the only thing you can do – and it’s the same for us.” “It did not come across at all…He focused, and he went into work. ![]() He only learned recently how apprehensive Craig had been. “And then he nailed it completely – and everything turned.” It was insane: ‘the Crown Jewels of English film.’” Mikkelsen scoffs, with marvellous Scandi disdain. “Unless he closed his eyes, he was being bombarded, morning and evening, by the newspapers: ‘He sucks’, ‘he’s blonde’, ‘look at his nose’. We compare it to Daniel Craig, criticised as Bond before he even began. “If you started listening to everything, you wouldn’t dare to take one step.” “There’s so much pressure,” he says with a shrug. 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).īut the external pressure on him to rescue a franchise deemed “doomed” by the press, he found easy to dismiss. 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. 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.įans 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. Mikkelsen himself sees his Grindelwald as an extension of Depp’s character, not a reset. The difference is rather like that between Depp’s Willy Wonka, and Gene Wilder’s: more human – and with it more unnerving. 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. “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.Įarly 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. 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. It is easy to see why Mikkelsen was reportedly Fantastic Beasts director David Yates’ first choice. 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.
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