Although Mads Mikkelsen has been knighted by two separate countries for his services to the arts, he first came to the stage almost by accident. Born and raised in working-class Copenhagen, he trained as a gymnast and spent ten years as a dancer before realizing that what most appealed to him was the drama of performance. His breakthrough was in “Pusher,” a Danish gangster movie shot on a tiny budget, which became a cult hit. Mikkelsen modelled his character, Tonny, on Robert De Niro’s in “Mean Streets,” but he had a frenetic energy and easy naturalism all his own. Coming up in the Danish film scene at the same time as directors such as Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg felt, he told me recently, like being “the naughty boys in the class who were doing something that hadn’t been done before.”
Read Full Article »
