Mads Mikkelsen, who crossed over when he played the villain Le Chiffre in Daniel Craig’s inaugural James Bond outing, CASINO ROYALE, is about to have a monster year. With mysterious roles in two different blockbusters that serve as the latest entries in the two biggest properties in Hollywood- Marvel and Star Wars– he’s about to be seen by a lot of people.

The actor recently sat down with Digital Spy to promote a movie that couldn’t be more different from the two titans he’s set to appear in- DOCTOR STRANGE and ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY. The film is called MEN AND CHICKEN, and it’s a low-budget Danish black comedy. A very different animal, indeed.

During the interview, comparisons are drawn between his experience with MEN AND CHICKEN and what it was like to work on DOCTOR STRANGE and ROGUE ONE. Mikkelsen says that one of the biggest differences is how different the responsibilities of the directors involved are. 

Of the director at the helm of a big-budget American blockbuster, he says he “has a billion things to see to, but we try to make it the same, try to sit down, discuss the scenes before we shoot them.” He continues, “We try to make it a smaller room than it is in reality and make the scenes be like any other scene – forget about the big spaceships, forget about the 500 people walking around you, try to make it intimate.”

Speaking of “big spaceships,” what was it like working with all the CGI that was likely part of the process for DOCTOR STRANGE?

“CGI is not a new thing for me, I’ve done it in a few movies. This one was not too bad, the CGI was not in direct interaction with me in my scenes. It was more like the backdrops, the landscapes would be slightly different sometimes, but I didn’t have to interact with it. But I’ve done that before in Clash of the Titans when we were fighting giant monsters. They were obviously not in the film and I was fighting tennis balls, and that I’d say is real acting!”

On whether or not he brought any of MEN AND CHICKEN‘s dark humor to his role in DOCTOR STRANGE, Mikkelsen said:

“You can’t bring it yourself. If it’s in the script you have to sort of lean into the script that’s already there. There is some. My character is not necessarily carrying too much of it but Doctor Strange is. There’s a certain darkness in the Doc and a sense of humor in there, absolutely.”

That addresses one of the common questions when it comes to Marvel’s films: “How much comedy should we expect?” According to Mikkelsen, sounds like not much.

From here, the conversation shifted gears towards ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY. The actor revealed that the infamous reshoots are set to end soon, and that his part in them is done. He maintains that the reshoots were nothing out of the ordinary for him. He went on to praise director Gareth Edwards:

“[He was] wonderful. He made it quite easy for us to feel like we are in a real film; in a real situation; and forgetting about all the circumstances, all the monsters, all the spaceships, all the planets, so he was a real actors’ man for us.”

The last interesting bit from the interview comes in his answer to whether or not he was a STAR WARS fan before taking the ROGUE ONE gig:

“I am now, but no, I did not grow up with it. I grew up with Bruce Lee and stuff like that. I never watched the Star Wars films, and I never watched the James Bond films, so I caught up on that later in my life, and what a treat I was in for.”

SOURCE: Digital Spy