Mads Mikkelsen Reveals Why ‘The Promised Land’ Means So Much to Him

The Big Picture

• “The Promised Land” is a historical drama by director Nikolaj Arcel and stars Mads Mikkelsen. It has been shortlisted for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards.
• The film’s stunning cinematography and Mikkelsen’s performance have been praised by critics, even surpassing the director’s expectations considering the budget.
• Arcel and Mikkelsen discuss their friendship, the differences between making movies in Denmark and Hollywood, and their dream projects in a recent Q&A.

Reuniting 10 years after their Oscar-nominated collaboration on A Royal Affair, Danish filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel and Mads Mikkelsen have their sights set on the Academy Awards once more with their historical drama, The Promised Land. As part of Collider’s FYC Screening Series at Landmark Theaters, the duo kicked off our awards season event with a special event, followed by an exclusive Q&A hosted by Editor-in-Chief Steve Weintraub.

Ahead of the screening, The Promised Land was shortlisted for Best International Feature Film alongside features like J.A. Bayona‘s Society of the Snow and Hlynur Pálmason‘s Godland. It’s little wonder with Mikkelsen’s performance and cinematographer Rasmus Videbæk‘s sweeping camerawork, which Arcel says, “surpassed my dreams of what could be possible on a budget that we have.” This Danish Western pits real-life Captain Ludvig Kahlen (Mikkelsen) against the formidable Jutland heath he wishes to tame, and the sinister and greedy Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bjenneberg), who claims ownership over the land.

Check out the video above, or you can read the full transcript below to find out how filmmaking in Hollywood differs from Denmark’s industry, including the full creative license for Arcel to claim on his adaptation. Mikkelsen discusses how much involvement he has from script to screen with movies outside the U.S., the challenges he’s always willing to tackle, his dream project, and teaming up again with Hannibal showrunner, Bryan Fuller, for his feature debut, Dust Bunny. The duo also talk their 10-year friendship, why The Promised Land being shortlisted is so important, and tons more.

COLLIDER: Gentlemen, I really want to start with a congratulations. You guys made such an exceptional film. Before we get into your film, I have a few curveballs to start things off. For both of you, if someone has actually never seen anything you’ve done before, what is the first thing you’d like them watching and why?

MADS MIKKELSEN: Well, in that case, that will be the first film I’m in. I think you should start from there, which is called Pusher. So, that’s from ‘95, I believe.

NIKOLAJ ARCEL: Being a director, I will always say watch the last film I’ve done because you always, as a director, usually sort of hate all the other movies you do, and see them in a perspective of, “Oh my god, I was so young. I didn’t know what I was doing.” So I would always say what’s the last film I did, no matter which film it is.

Can We Get Mads Mikkelsen a Role in the Bruce Lee Biopic?

I’ve heard that from other directors. For both of you, if you could get the financing to make anything you want tomorrow, what is the thing you’d like to make and why?

MIKKELSEN: I mean, I don’t know, can you bring Bruce Lee back from the dead? How much money does that take? I’d like to be in a film with Bruce Lee and Buster Keaton. I don’t know what the film is about, but it’s gonna be great.

I actually wanna do a follow-up to that because right now behind the scenes there’s a lot of people selling their likeness rights because of what’s going on with AI, and at some point in the not-so-distant future, what you just said is actually possible. Does that frighten you, or if someone came to you and said, “With AI and computers, we can literally make this movie,” would you be interested in it?

MIKKELSEN: No. [Laughs] No, I know I wanna meet Bruce Lee and Buster Keaton. I mean, there are perspectives that that’s interesting, and for certain kinds of films, obviously the big blockbusters — let’s say Marvel’s fantastic films — there are certain things that you can get away with. If you want to jump in time and have somebody who’s 20 years old and then 80, I think within the realm of still being creative, you can do something interesting. But just giving your image away, I don’t think anyone wants to be part of that.

Did you figure out what you would make if you could get the financing for anything?

ARCEL: I don’t know, man. I think probably some sci-fi movie. In Denmark, we don’t have big budgets. It’s where the money is quite small. But I do have a dream of one day making a sci-fi movie, and I think that that’s gonna be hard on the Danish budget, but maybe I’ll try one day.

MIKKELSEN: Why are you looking at me?

ARCEL: I don’t know. [Laughs] If I can get you to star in it maybe it will be easier to finance.

I am curious, and maybe you’ve sort of just answered it, but what do you think would surprise people to learn about making movies in Denmark and in Hollywood?

MIKKELSEN: Obviously the budget, and also the amount of people. In Denmark you say good morning to 15 people, and in America you say good morning to three or 400. So, that’s a difference. I mean, for me, it’s a different thing. As an actor, you go into that world, you find the parameters of the framework of what we’re doing, there might be a genre in there, and you try to make it as honest as possible within that world. So, I can’t call the director in the middle of the night the same way I can call Nik — which you told me not to, but I still did.

ARCEL: At some point, you have to sleep.

MIKKELSEN: But besides that, we will enter a world that is pretty much the same. It’s just a different relationship you have with each other. For a director, I believe it’s a very different thing.

ARCEL: Yeah. For director, it’s very different. There’s a couple of reasons. First of all, when I’m making movies in Denmark, it’s very much my work. I have final cut. I have final say. It’s my vision from top to bottom, and from beginning to end. And I’ve done one film here — let’s not speak too much of that — which was not my film. It ended up being something I didn’t have, really, power to make. There were just a lot of decision makers. Everybody wants to make a good movie, but if you’re, like, 100 chefs on the same thing, it’s very hard. Especially coming from a Danish background of the auteur cinema, it’s very hard to find your footing in that system. I felt, at least.

Mads Mikkelsen Is Always Up for a Challenge

Mads, individual question for you. I am a really big fan, just like everyone in the room, of your work. I think you’re an exceptional actor, and I’m just curious, when you are getting ready to film, say, The Promised Land, how early on are you thinking about the character prior to the first day of filming and thinking about what you wanna do? How much are you sort of doing a lot towards the end? Could you take us through your process a little bit on getting ready for a role?

MIKKELSEN: Well, I get invited in on different stages in different films. In American films, it’s written, it’s always done. Say the words, and don’t knock over the furniture, and you’re fine, right? Here in Denmark, it’s a different thing. I’m invited in when the story is almost done, and then we start talking and we develop. They do listen to me and I can have some input, and sometimes they say, “Well, that’s a bad idea,” but I will insist, and we can go back and forth. Then, on the first day of shooting, it is very interesting because I think about it all the time. It’s a gradual development of the character. I’m always curious what we’re gonna shoot the first day because the first day is very important for everyone. Obviously, for the director. Everybody’s thinking about it. We’re not gonna shoot the most difficult scene the first day, but what he might think is not a super difficult thing can be a very difficult scene for my character. It can be somewhere I haven’t really found yet. Maybe it’s just nice to see him do some walking first, you know? So, I’m always curious. But it’s a challenge, and I’ll take it up every time.

Donald Sutherland told me something that I found fascinating. He said that he now demands that the first day or two of filming, he is filming things from the middle of the movie because that way, “By then, the people have bought into what I’m selling and I can figure it out.”

MIKKELSEN: [Laughs] That’s smart. He’s a smart man.

When he said it to me, I’m like, “This is brilliant.” So, let me ask you another follow-up on acting. Say you have a very emotional or dramatic scene on a Monday morning and you know it’s a challenge and you’ve gotta pull to deliver what you are trying to do. How far before Monday morning when you’re gonna film are you thinking about that scene? Is it months early, is it at the beginning of the shoot, or is it, like, over the weekend you are really in it?

MIKKELSEN: Hopefully we’ve addressed that scene a long time ago so we know what it’s about, we know where we wanna go, approximately. If I overthink it two months before, I’m gonna strangle that scene. I won’t have the balls to go there at all. It has to be a natural, gradual development of the film so when that scene pops up, we shouldn’t be afraid of it. We should be ready for it, but we shouldn’t over prepare for it. Having said that, if it’s five in the morning, I will get up at one in the morning and get ready. I mean, I’m not gonna go straight into the scene, but I don’t think you should overthink stuff. If we touched upon it, we’re on the same page, don’t strangle it. Let it be a natural development.

‘The Promised Land’ Is an Emotional, Personal Adaptation, Says Director

Jumping into why I get to talk to you guys, for both of you, what was it about this material that said, “I need to make this?”

ARCEL: For me, it’s a novel, this is an adaptation of a novel, and it was reading the novel and just falling in love with the characters. I think the first character I fell in love with — sorry, Mads, but that was not your character — that was the character of Anmai Mus, the little girl. Anyway, so the little girl, she was the one I fell in love with first, and then came somebody else I don’t remember, and then maybe you…I’m kidding, of course. But also, it was personal to me because it’s a film about a very ambitious guy who finds out very late in life that there’s something else to life other than his ambitions and his drive, and I’ve had that same trajectory. I had my first child three years ago, which is quite late — I’m 51. So, it wasn’t until that happened that I realized, “Oh my god, there’s a whole other world,” and it’s kind of the same thing that Ludvig experiences in the movie. So to me, it was reading something that felt close to my heart.

MIKKELSEN: Well, I just got offered the part, so I didn’t know. I didn’t read the book. For me, it was a pitch and then it was a script, and from there on we started working. I don’t have much to add. I can’t tell the big difference working with Nik 10 years ago and now, but then again, I can. There is definitely a different kind of focus. I mean, we were younger. There’s a lot of energy in that film, and I think we were approaching it with the same professional eyes, but there’s definitely something that happened with what the focus of the story is because of, obviously, you having kids.

Why ‘The Promised Land’s Oscar Shortlisting Matters

The film is on the shortlist for Best International Feature, which is a huge honor. What does it mean to both of you to actually have so many people loving this movie and for it to be shortlisted?

ARCEL: It’s always great to be recognized. It’s always great. But the greatest thing about it is that the reason we make these films is for people to go watch them, right? That’s the main reason. So all this, all that’s going on around the shortlist and the film festivals and everything, it really helps people to notice that it’s coming, and they see it. So, for me, that’s really what it’s about. It’s getting the film out to as many people as possible.

MIKKELSEN: That’s the main goal. But at the same time, you have to understand that there are thousands of films every year coming out, and that somebody out there thinks that we are worthy of being among the 15 films that might be nominated for an Oscar, it’s…

ARCEL: It’s incredible.

MIKKELSEN: It’s mind-blowing. And we’re Danish. [Laughs] We’re just happy that somebody watched it.

At what point, though, was it the script phase, was it when you were shooting, or when it was in post-production, that you both realized, “Wait a minute, this might be a pretty special movie?”

ARCEL: I never realized that. I am always so self-critical, but I have been on every single film I’ve done, and I never realized what I’ve done until somebody else, until I see it with an audience for the first time. Really, honestly. But for this, I think it was our co-writer, Anders Thomas [Jensen], who’s quite a cynical guy, I would say. When he went in to see a cut he came out with tears in his eyes, like, “Oh my god, we have something here!” Because he was actually moved by it, and he usually is not. So, that was the point for me where I realized it might be a decent film.

MIKKELSEN: Yeah, it felt good all through, and then I had a few scenes with a little girl. She’s just priceless. And I remember there was a scene — I mean, you can feel a certain way and it doesn’t turn out that way. That’s often the case for an actor. But then I was having a discussion with you, we’d just shot a scene where all the fields are on fire and she’s running around doing stuff, and I was looking at the monitor, which I never do, I never watch anything we’re doing, and I just saw this amazing work our DP was doing. I thought we were just jumping around with some flames in the background. It was just insane to watch, and that’s when I felt like, “Maybe we’re onto something here.”

When you looked at the shooting schedule, what was the day that you had circled in terms of, “How are we gonna do this,” or, “I can’t wait to shoot this?”

ARCEL: For me, and because of the budget constraints, I think we had about $7 million to make this film, every single day was like, “Oh my god, how are we even gonna do this?” So literally, almost every day it was like, “There’s no way.” Like the fire scene, and the snow and the rain, and every day was trying to achieve something that has scope with very little money somehow. But I always look forward to these things because it’s a great challenge.

But really, what I enjoy the most, and always have, are the small, intimate scenes between the actors. So I was always looking forward to these sort of more melodramatic, if you would say, the dramatic scenes between just maybe you and Amanda [Collin], who plays Ann Barbara, or you and Melina [Hagberg], who play Anmai Mus. And especially the scenes between you and Simon [Bennebjerg], who plays Schinkel. I was looking forward to those scenes a lot.

MIKKELSEN: I was looking forward to all the scenes, but I was also looking forward to the scenes where we had the budget in mind, which is always fun, because that reminds me of the first times we were shooting when we had a budget of, let’s say, $200,000, and we just made a feature film. Like the Pusher films. And this was the case always, like, “Okay, so the goat we just killed that is full of blood now, can we somehow clean it up and have it in the background for the next shot?” That’s the way you everyone has to work together to make this work because that’s the kind of budget.

‘The Priest and the Potatoes,’ Starring Mads Mikkelsen, Streaming 2024

I’m fascinated by the editing process because it’s where it all comes together. How did this film possibly change in the editing room in ways you did not expect?

ARCEL: There was one big thing, because I told myself that I didn’t wanna make an overly long film, and, I mean, it’s two hours long, so it’s already long enough, but at one point it was three-hours-and-something. In the editing room I really had to cut something. This is not something I usually would say to an audience who’s just seen the film, but there were certain things that we did cut out. There was a lot more story with the priest, for instance, who became a smaller character. There were certain things with Edel, the noble woman, which we cut. We just tried to trim the fat, in general, and not make it, like, self-indulgent. And I think that’s also part of what you said — we are different. 10 years ago, I would have probably been a little bit more in love with, “Oh, look at the wonderful work we’ve done. Let’s just keep that scene going for 10 minutes.” Now, I’m much more like, “No, we will service the story no matter what cost.”

MIKKELSEN: Well, I’m still like 10 years ago. I like films that are four hours long, but I do get it. They shouldn’t listen to me. Occasionally, they should. But I’m the one who says, “No, no, no, no, no, no. It’s fine.” I mean, for me, a four-hour film can feel fast, and a film that’s one-and-a-half hours long can feel very, very long. If it works, it works. And I think they had the right mix in.

Do you remember what was the last thing you cut out before you picture locked?

ARCEL: Oh god, that’s so specific. Yeah, I do. I do remember. That was a scene with the priest, actually. That was a scene with the priest where Ludvig and the priest are walking around in the heath and trying to find a spot for Ludvig to build the house. So yeah, that was probably the last scene that we cut, which was, I think, three days before the picture locked.

Are you a fan of extended cuts? For example, with this, you have a lot of deleted scenes. Is it something that you wanna show people, or are you sort of like, “The theatrical cut is the movie?”

ARCEL: The theatrical cut is the movie, but there will be an extended cut. But that’s purely for, I think, streaming. A year from now we have a longer version going into streaming.

MIKKELSEN: And it’s gonna be called The Priest.

ARCEL: [Laughs] The Priest and the Potatoes. That sounds like a thrilling movie. No, I am a fan. I actually always watch the director’s cuts, even if they’re a little worse than the theatrical cuts, because I’m fascinated by the stuff that they thought would work, or that they had in the script. I love that.

Mads, I’m curious, when was the last time the night before the first day of filming you were scared shitless about what you were about to step into on set? Was there a role that you were really nervous about right before filming began?

MIKKELSEN: No. I mean, the things that don’t work on paper will always scare the shit out of you, right? Scenes that are difficult, and maybe emotional or very physical, but are right, they don’t scare you as much as scenes that don’t work. A scene that doesn’t work and you haven’t come to an agreement with your director, you just know what the day is gonna be like. It’s just gonna be an uphill battle, and that can scare me. Waking up maybe with a pain in your back and doing flying kung fu can also scare you. I tend not to be super afraid of things. I tend to like to grab it by the root, and if there’s something that bothers me and will make me afraid, eventually I will pick up the phone and meet up with the people and say, “Let’s let’s fix this,” or, “Make me comfortable because something is not working here.” So, that’s how I approach it.

I’ve spoken to a lot of actors, and they talk about how they really like doing a lot of takes, I’ve spoken to directors that really like doing a lot of takes, and some actors like a take or two and they just wanna move on. For both of you, how many takes do you typically like to do on a movie, and at what point do you start saying, “Okay, come on?” Or do you enjoy doing just a few takes?

ARCEL: We’re completely in sync, I think. We always do, like…

MIKKELSEN: Two takes.

ARCEL: Yeah. But that’s with you, Mads, because you’re so precise and you can do the two takes and then you’re good. Maybe I’ll ask for a third take, right?

MIKKELSEN: I’ll ask for a fifth take if it doesn’t work. I mean, there’s no rules, right? If we’re almost there, then you can see in his face, “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Moving on.” Then you go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no, no. Let’s just make one more. This is not working.” And you can tell when it’s not working. “That’s a little more in there,” right? But often, and you ask most directors and most actors, “First or second take?” There is what we call in Denmark the butterfly dust is there. There’s a certain unknown territory that, if we do too much, it will be all over-rehearsed, right? So often, the first and the second take, there are some magic in them.

ARCEL: Definitely. But then of course, whenever we did a scene with the girl, Melina who plays Anmai Mus, we did 30 takes because she would never remember any of her lines. [Laughs]

MIKKELSEN: But she’s a child, and she’s never done anything before.

ARCEL: It’s understandable.

MIKKELSEN: She speaks Swedish and not Danish.

ARCEL: Yeah, she barely understood what I was trying to direct her.

MIKKELSEN: And what we were looking for was something just really natural from her, and that came if we just kept going. She just got fed up with the words and she came up with something else that was absolutely fantastic. And that’s what we went for a few times.

ARCEL: Do you guys remember when she, at one point, the little bit in the film where everybody’s happy, and she goes, “Pancakes!”? That wasn’t [in the script], that was just something she did. Literally, she was so happy that we had given her real pancakes, and she goes, “Pancakes!” And I was like, “That’s great. We’re gonna use that.”

MIKKELSEN: Exactly.

Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Arcel Are an Oscar-Worthy Duo

AUDIENCE: What’s your favorite thing about working together, and is there something about working together that challenges you a little bit?

ARCEL: I love every second of working with Mads.

MIKKELSEN: Well, ditto. That’s the answer. [Laughs] No, I mean, we worked together 10 years ago, and that’s always a risk, and since then we’ve become friends. And then he didn’t call me for 10 years for some reason…

ARCEL: You always tell that story.

MIKKELSEN: Well, you called me because you wanted to, you know, borrow my bicycle or something. There’s always a risk when you know each other well, that you just open the drawer and you do what you’re used to. But if you push each other a little, there’s also the benefit of we might dare tread on territories that we wouldn’t dare to tread on with somebody else, and that’s the benefit of knowing each other really well.

ARCEL: So I guess the answer is there weren’t a lot of challenges. I mean, we do challenge each other a lot. We certainly will not get into fights, but we’ll certainly try to push each other to both be better at whatever, or get somewhere. Sometimes we’ll get stuck with the scene and we go, like, “Something’s missing. What is it?” We’ll go into a discussion about it. But the beauty of knowing each other so well is that it becomes a very easy conversation, and there’s no awkward like, “Oh, I wonder if he doesn’t like me…” It’s just like, “Whatever.” We can say anything.

MIKKELSEN: “When am I gonna get my bike back?” I think that’s the trust thing. There’s a very good example in this film of the trust thing, because we’re obviously dealing with circumstances coming from outside that is making this guy’s life difficult, and Barbara’s life, and the little girl — everybody’s life is difficult. But at the same time, we’re also dealing with a person, a character, who’s creating his own problems. There’s plenty of times he could have turned left instead of turning right. So, “If you just turn left now you can shape your story. Everything will be beautiful,” but he is so stubborn, so he’s creating his own drama. And the trust that we’re talking about here is that that was in there in the first version of the story; I thought it could be much more at a certain point, and Nikolaj had a hunch it could, but maybe we shouldn’t go there too much because we don’t wanna lose sympathy. But then he trust me to say, “Listen, we’ll get it back home somehow. We’ll get it back home in this scene,” and that’s trust. It’s like, “Okay, let him be somebody we dislike for 68 pages, and then it happens,” and that’s trust. And so, I think that was a very important part of the story originally, and also in the script, but we might not have gone so far with the character if we didn’t trust each other.

ARCEL: You definitely helped enhance that part and made me courageous in terms of not trying to immediately create a character that we identify with, but is more sort of hard to actually love, which really works so well for the film.

AUDIENCE: What was it like preparing for the scene where Ludvig gets tortured by Schinkel and his henchmen? Ludvig is such an intense character, and yet he’s going through this intense emotional and physical experience, so how do you approach that? Is that different from other scenes?

MIKKELSEN: It’s a strange thing, obviously, because I’m not getting whipped in real life — sorry — so there’s a timing thing going on there. So, that’s a technical thing we have to get out of the way. If we’re both in the frame, I somehow have to know exactly when it hits, and we find a way that we have something that I can feel, but then it’s just super cold, and staying there, it’s just super annoying. My knees are hurting, we’re doing it for eight hours, and eventually you just want to get out of the situation. Imagining something like that is what we do. We’re professional imagineers, or liars, or whatever, and it’s just diving in there. And everybody hates you — the guys who are killing you, the guy who’s the baron. It’s lonely. And you wanna keep your face so you’re holding it in for a while, and eventually you can’t. So, I don’t know how to approach that. Sometimes it’s just in the room. You can just feel the menace and you just go with it.

How Mads Mikkelsen Chooses His Next Project

AUDIENCE: What inspires you both to do what you do?

MIKKELSEN: Easy for me. It’s people like Nik. For me, I have the advantage of being the kid who never grew up. I am a professional liar, I run around and get opportunities to do things that nobody else is allowed to. “I might ride a horse! I have a super cool hawk on my arm. I’m flying through the air in a kung fu fight.” So, I’m just waiting for people to have a vision and a dream to come along, and if I like that dream, it becomes my dream. So, this is what keeps me going. It’s meeting people like Nik, or meeting Nik and seeing the flames in their eyes, and then it flames me, as well, and it’s like, “Let’s go.”

I’m surprised, considering he has your bicycle. And what’s your reason?

ARCEL: I just love storytelling, and I don’t know where it comes from. It’s like making movies with my Star Wars figures when I was seven and just going from there. It’s been no looking back. I don’t know where it came from. I just love telling stories.

AUDIENCE: Why did you change the title from The Bastard to The Promised Land?

ARCEL: The US distributors felt it was a little negative, I think. On certain levels, I didn’t understand it because I love the title, The Bastard; on another level, I did. In Denmark, “the bastard” only means an illegitimate son, so it doesn’t mean a dick. It just means, like, an illegitimate son. So, I understand that the negative connotation might have made people think the film was about something else than it was.

AUDIENCE: Nik, this is your sixth time working with cinematographer, Rasmus [Videbæk]. The movie was shot beautifully. What problems did you have to find solutions for when filming in such an empty area, or nature?

ARCEL: I’ve never worked with any other DP than this guy. There were not a lot of problems on this one because he has grown so much. He was already great on our first film, but he’s such a great DP, and he knows my brain so well because we’ve known each other since we were in our twenties, so he was amazing. On every single setup we were doing, he surpassed my dreams of what could be possible on a budget that we have. So, I would say no challenge at all. It was just wonderful.

His work is fantastic in this. It really is.

AUDIENCE: What was it like working around the weather?

ARCEL: Here’s a funny anecdote about the weather, because when you’re working on a budget like we had, you don’t have time to say, “Oh, we’re gonna wait for a sunny day,” or, “We’re gonna wait for a wintry day.” We shot everything in the fall. So, the way we did it was we would shoot a winter scene over here and we would do some such, and then suddenly, we had a person looking at the sky going, “There’s sun coming!” And then we would run over. While we ran, Mads would change his clothes and get ready for a summer scene. We would walk over here and shoot literally just two images from that scene, and then, “Oh, the sun is gone, back to the winter scene.” That was the craziest thing ever, but it was so much fun. We had a lot of fun doing that.

MIKKELSEN: Yeah, it’s the best fun. It’s the best energy because you feel like a unit. Everybody’s working on the same project. But in general, besides being a pain technically for a lot of departments, when the weather is crazy, it is a helping hand for the actor always because we don’t have to pretend it anymore. It’s there. So we don’t have to go, “Whoa, it’s windy.” No, it is really windy, you know?

AUDIENCE: I’m curious about your experience co-writing the script with Anders Thomas. I’m a really big fan of him, and I love the way you guys balanced darkness and humor. So, what was your experience writing the script with him, and what was your experience working on it?

MIKKELSEN: Well, I know them both very well. Funny enough, some of the stuff I was 100% sure Anders Thomas was writing, some of the funny punchlines, and vice versa, some of the more emotional stuff, I got it completely wrong. It turned out that, “Oh, Nik wrote that punchline, that little joke, and Thomas was going down a dark alley with some emotions here.” So, they rub off on each other in a fantastic way that surprises you.

ARCEL: He’s amazing. He’s a great writer. We’ve worked together before, but this is what feels like our first real collaboration, true collaboration, and he’s incredible. And what he brought to me was something that I hadn’t been able to do in my previous films, which was a really true sort of emotional… Like, he wrote a lot of the Anmai Mus/Ludvig scenes, and I thought they were so beautiful. He’s unafraid of being overtly emotional, which I am a little afraid of, so it was great to have him here and just push me, and, “Don’t worry, it’s fine. You can always tone it down if it gets too much.”

Mads Mikkelsen Reunites With Bryan Fuller for ‘Dust Bunny’

AUDIENCE: You’ve worked with previous directors a couple of different times, like Bryan Fuller. Does that have anything to do with how you choose projects?

MIKKELSEN: It’s a combination. Let’s put it this way, if Nik, who I wanted to work with again, came up with something I really hate it, it wouldn’t have happened. But, of course, he doesn’t. He comes up with something that I find fantastic and interesting. It’s often the case, when you work with somebody before that you really liked, it’s rarely gonna happen that they’re gonna come up with something that you dislike. So, even if you kind of like it, but you’re not really understanding it completely, you’re willing to go there because you trust them. So, I have been working more than one time with a lot of people, and for that reason, because I do believe that the more comfortable you are with each other, the more you can push each other. That’s just been my little safety net, I guess.

Before we get to the next question, for everyone in the audience, if you have not seen Hannibal I was gonna say it’s an exceptional show and for the love of god, you should watch it. Especially if you enjoy Mad’s work.

MIKKELSEN: So what your question was, the Hannibal show, the showrunner was Bryan Fuller and we’ve just finished a film last year. That is his first film as a director, and it’s called Dust Bunny, coming out sometime in the future.

And if you look at Bryan Fuller’s Instagram, you might see pictures here and there.

MIKKELSEN: You bet.

Yeah, he’s teasing stuff. Anyway, back to why we’re here.

Is Mads Mikkelsen Going To Be at Comic-Con 2024?

AUDIENCE: Mads, will you be attending any conventions in the US?

MIKKELSEN: That’s a good finish. I don’t know. And that’s a terrible answer, but I don’t know. It’s always depending on if I’m working, if I do have the time off, or if there’s something else I have to do. So, I’m not sure at this point.

Can I do a follow-up to that? Have you done a lot of conventions? I actually don’t know.

MIKKELSEN: I’ve done a few. A couple in America, a few in London, and a few in Asia. I’ve been to Tokyo and Seoul a couple of times, and Osaka.

Is it something that you enjoy?

MIKKELSEN: It’s overwhelming. There’s a lot of love in the room. When I say a lot, it’s a lot. So, you just have to get ready for that because it is fantastic and beautiful, but it’s also exhausting. But, I mean, it’s fantastic. People get a photo, they get an autograph, and it’s so fast sometimes that you’re ashamed of yourself, but this is what it is when they do cons like that. It’s an overwhelming emotional experience, but I do enjoy meeting all these people.

The Promised Land is in theaters on February 2.