Why Indiana Jones Villain Mads Mikkelsen Loves Playing Bad Guys
Mads Mikkelsen has played some of the most iconic villains in fiction throughout his career in Hollywood. He cried blood and played very high-stakes poker with James Bond (Daniel Craig) as Le Chiffre in "Casino Royale," stacked corpses under the nose of Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) as Dr. Hannibal Lecter in "Hannibal," and menaced the Three Musketeers in Paul W.S. Anderson's "Three Musketeers" as Rochefort. Now, he's set to add another baddie to his personal rogues' gallery in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," in which he is set to play Nazi Jürgen Voller. And according to Mikkelsen himself in a Deadline interview, he loves playing these types of roles again and again.
Mikkelsen, a veteran performer, seems to have room in his actor's heart for both the Hollywood and European approaches to character and enjoys working in both kinds of movies.
"The baddies is something that is kind of concentrated in America. I don't think we've ever made a film in Denmark, where we have like villains," Mikkelsen told Deadline, observing a difference between Hollywood films and those more artistic projects he takes in his own country. "I embrace it. I'm lucky that it's different genres, different frameworks and I get a chance to play some different villains... I have a career back home and in Europe, where I get the chance to play variations of real human beings."
Mikkelsen didn't spend too much time analyzing Voller's backstory and motivations
Mads Mikkelsen is no stranger to thorough character studies in films, but he explained to Deadline that "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is a very different kind of movie.
"If we were doing a different kind of film and diving down into the darkness of what that ideology meant to the world, it would be a very different approach," the actor said. "This is obviously an 'Indiana Jones' film, and they're [the baddies] are there for a purpose. They're very easy to read. They're the bad guys for a reason."
But that doesn't mean that Mikkelsen simply plays the role of a villain and leaves it at that. Quite the contrary, he says that inside the twisted mind of Jürgen Voller, he is the hero of his own story: "I believe my characters are the heroes of their own story in their own world," he said. "It's no secret that this is based loosely on the real-life Nazi and later NASA engineer Wernher von Braun, a notable German scientist among the hundreds who worked for NASA right after the war."
Fans of Mikkelsen will soon get to see the actor's latest menace in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" when it hits theaters on June 30.