Sexy Danish star Mads Mikkelson, 47, bit into international fame this year: he had the title role in NBC TV’s hit “Hannibal,” and literally lost his head in the Oscar-nominated historical romance “A Royal Affair.”
Mikkelsen saved the best for last with Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Hunt” (opening Friday), a devastating Danish drama for which he won best actor honors at Cannes in 2012. He plays a divorced schoolteacher who becomes a pariah in his small town when his best friend’s kindergartner accuses him of abuse.
Audiences exit the theater embroiled in debates about child abuse and society and divided in their reactions to what they saw on the screen: but no one is divided on Mikkelsen’s understated performance. He is a major star.
Did this trifecta of successes on big and small screen surprise you?
I never planned a career. I’ve tried to avoid it. I’ve just been meeting these fantastic directors who’ve offered me a variation of different parts and different films. And now it’s landed here.
In “The Hunt,” you play an ordinary man changed by extraordinary circumstances and local hysteria.
Lucas is a traditional average of a Scandinavian man, what Vinterberg called a “castrated man.” The man that believes in society will take care of the problems and that we are civilized people and we will behave civilized through any problems we might face.
And then Lucas finds himself accused of the unthinkable – and his social position crumbles.
Yes. In this crisis, it turns out to be so much more complicated than he thought it would be. He’s divorced. He used to work at a school and the school closed. Now he’s working in a kindergarten and he’s trying to get his feet back on the ground. And he has a teenage son. And he’s doing pretty well. He’s climbed up the ladder again.
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And then there is that kiss in the kindergarten, where his best friend’s daughter plants her lips on his.
It’s not a grownup love. But it’s the girl’s fascination with this person, her father’s friend, her teacher. After she kisses him, he does the right thing. She should know that she shouldn’t kiss him on the mouth. But she didn’t. I mean we’re living in Scandinavia. [Read more…]