Mads Mikkelsen’s curious first trip to the Cannes Film Festival: “I was wearing big woollen socks”
These days, Mads Mikkelsen has been to enough film festivals and awards ceremonies to treat them as second nature. That wasn’t quite the case the first time the actor made the trip to Cannes, though, where he probably left many attendees wondering what on earth he was doing.
In his defence, he was fairly new to the industry at the time, having only made three movies in his native Denmark. Still, he should have at least had an inkling of what goes down on the Croisette, seeing as he was there to try and drum up support for his fourth feature-length outing.
One of the highest-profile events on the cinematic calendar, Cannes draws attention from all over the world of filmmaking. It hosts premieres that range from inordinately expensive blockbusters to micro-budget independent pictures cobbled together on a shoestring by auteurs with nothing more than a dream and plenty of ambition.
For Mikkelsen, he was there as a first-time participant alongside Nicolas Winding Refn, with the pair attempting to gain attention for 1999’s Bleeder. A hard-hitting international crime drama hailing from the duo who gained no small amount of underground awareness for their previous partnership on Pusher sounds right up Cannes’ street, except for the fact the star had never heard of the festival and had no idea what he was supposed to do while he was there.
“I hadn’t ever heard of Cannes, and I didn’t know what a film review was,” he admitted to Screen Daily. Instead of operating through the usual industry channels that allow creatives from all walks of life to rub shoulders, shoot the breeze, and have a professional schmooze, Mikkelsen ended up standing on the Croisette “handing out DVDs saying, ‘Do you want to watch this film?'”
Instead of being there as a professional who’d completed a new film, he came off as a hawker trying to shill copies of Bleeder to passers-by. “We had no idea how it worked,” came the sombre – and obvious – confession. “I was wearing big woollen socks; it was 35 degrees, and it wasn’t working.”
Even though he hails from the cooler climes of Denmark, it’s entirely on Mikkelsen that he pitched up on the coast of France in the middle of May and decided that woolly socks were the best form of attire to be pounding the pavement and enticing complete strangers to watch Bleeder.
He figured it out eventually, and his rise up the ladder can be neatly encapsulated by the fact that 24 years after his first visit to Cannes had been a curious disaster, he was there to promote his turn as the villainous Dr Jürgen Voller in James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a massive franchise flick that was about as far away from the unflinching intimacy of Bleeder as possible.
