Mads Mikkelsen: the best actor to never win an Oscar
For many actors, winning an Oscar is the ultimate achievement and form of validation, with Hollywood’s elite gathering in a room for one evening to celebrate their wins and commiserate over their losses. While some have found peace with the never-ending chase for approval and desire to be accepted into the inner circle of the critically awarded, many continue to seek the elusive golden statuette and finally shake free of their insecurities and embrace their undeniable talent.
Given the unpredictable and questionable taste of the Academy, it could be considered a futile and uncontrollable goal. Some of the greatest performers of all time have been snubbed of this recognition and ignored for undeniably influential performances. Isabelle Huppert did not win for her role in The Piano Teacher, and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name and Jeremy Strong in The Apprentice have recently been snubbed.
Despite the understandable frustration of this dismissal, which only becomes more difficult to conceal as you grow older and less acceptable as people deem being bothered by a lack of critical success increasingly uncool, the award does have an influence on the careers of those who win it, and sometimes a bit of recognition is very welcome when you spend years trying to break into a notoriously difficult industry.
While Mads Mikkelsen seems too cool to be bothered by a lack of critical recognition from the Academy, the repeated dismissal of his work continues to baffle me, especially given the influence of his early work within the Dogme movement.
Mikkelsen is one of the most intensely vulnerable and communicative performers I have ever watched on screen, operating in a subtle way as he carefully etches layers of emotion into a single glance and gesture. He has the power to rip your heart out with one look, existing as one of the few actors who can act with just his eyes, with words becoming entirely redundant as he communicates the most intricate of thoughts without saying anything at all.
He has become well-known for his portrayal of emotionally conflicted and tortured souls, something that we can see through Another Round, Open Hearts and The Hunt, playing men who are grappling with the overwhelming intensity of their inner world and living a somewhat secret life, battling against societal expectations and unjust assumptions and trying to maintain a sense of truth and integrity.
Mikkelsen is one of the most recognisable talents to emerge from the Dogme movement and wave of Danish independent cinema, developing his career into other cinematic strands over the years through his role in Casino Royale and the Star Wars franchise. However, while he has reached mainstream audiences over the years, perhaps it is this that has overshadowed his early achievements and roots in indie cinema, with his devastating vulnerability and simultaneous sense of sadness and bittersweet melancholia imbuing his work with a luminous sense of sensitivity and life, overflowing with tenderness and a nostalgic star quality that is so rarely captured on the big screen.
