ACTOR Mads Mikkelsen has a not-so-secret weapon when it comes to playing villains. Most of the characters he has portrayed have had some problem with their eyes.
So far in his career, Mikkelsen has played six characters with some form of ophthalmologic trauma, including his Bond villain Le Chiffre weeping blood in Casino Royale, his Kaecilius’ sinister purple-ringed peepers in Doctor Strange or his one-eyed killer in Valhalla Rising.
In Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Mikkelsen added another eye-challenged character to his repertoire, updating his tally to seven, as he takes on the role of Gellert Grindelwald, which was previously held by Johnny Depp.
Depp was ousted in 2020 after a U.K. court ruled against him in a libel lawsuit versus The Sun newspaper, which called Depp a “wife beater” following his tumultuous divorce from actress Amber Heard.
Depp denied the charges, but the verdict sent Warner Bros. scrambling to recast the pivotal Fantastic Beasts role while production on Secrets was underway.
Producers phoned Mikkelsen and gave him two days to decide.
“It was quite chaotic,” recalls Mikkelsen, who quickly watched the first two films and read the script for Secrets.
“You don’t want to copy anything [Depp was] doing – that would be creative suicide. Even if [a role has] been done to perfection, you want to make it your own. But you still have to build some sort of bridge between what came before.”
The Secrets team decided to tone down Grindelwald’s appearance, giving Mikkelsen just a hint of Depp’s platinum hair. They also dialed back Grindelwald’s albino right eye to be just slightly, almost unnoticeably, reptilian.
Both changes reflected the actor’s characteristically subtle approach.
The team also elected, more curiously, to not address the villain’s radical appearance change in the film, even though it could have been explained given that Grindelwald is, after all, a wizard.
“That was very deliberate,” Mikkelsen says.
“Everybody knows why [the actors changed]. The entire world knows why.”
Mikkelsen noted in one interview that he wished he could have spoken to Depp before tackling the role, a comment that went viral and one that the actor suggests has been overstated.
Another person Mikkelsen didn’t get to chat with was the film’s co-screenwriter and producer J.K. Rowling, who had spoken to the other lead actors about their roles for the previous films.
“It’s a fantastic, detailed, complex universe [Rowling’s] created, and I’d love to hear her thoughts on it. I hope I will do more than this one [film].”
