Mads Mikkelsen People Quotations

Sometimes we misunderstand what films can do. We just throw a whole book in there, with people just talking, talking, and talking. The picture can tell, the frame can tell.

If you have to be frightening, you need some actors around you to be really frightened. And if they're not frightened, you're not so frightening anymore. In the same way, people say, 'I think you come in, and you're really sexy'. But how do you play sexy? It depends on the eyes that are looking.

If you spend a week at a casino you will very easily see that people have a certain way of behaving in a casino.

Machiavelli had some cold tricks for people who wanted to be demagogues and wanted to take over the world.

I choose work with the people I like to work with.

I fancy myself at being pretty good at understanding a script and finding the weaknesses, and then making them more radical than they are. People tend to listen to me.

We have no chance to comprehend what goes on there - it's so dramatic, and people are so poor. We all felt bad about being there. Filming in India felt like we were going to borrow something knowing that we were never going to give it back.

I've never been a big fan of making telepathy to the audience. That would be too much a wink in the eye. That would make people around me fools, right?

A solid family, as they say. They join me on location if they have a chance, but I can also be home three or four months doing nothing, so I probably see my kids more than people who work constantly all year long. If that changes, we'll have to have a family meeting.

In Denmark, we're making 20 films a year. If I'm showing up in even two of those, people will get tired of me really fast.

If people need to be informed by lines, then there's no reason why the actor is saying the line except for information for the audience; I think there's something wrong.

I'm terrified about psychic people who have their little shops. I always walk across the street and go somewhere else. Imagine if one of them came out with their face all pale and said, 'Hurry up and enjoy yourself.' No one wants to know that.

I don't necessarily prefer playing villains. I know a lot of people say they are more fun, but if the scriptwriter has done their work well, you can find something realistic in a villain and find the mistakes in a hero - it's all down to the writing.

I would have turned any offer down, if it had turned into a thriller. I would have seen no point in a thriller here. I don't need to entertain people, on top of what we were doing. It's not a question of whether he did it or not. I would have thought that was banal and uninteresting, and I wouldn't care. And it could have also turned into a shoot-out because there were a lot of guns in the film.

I think 40 years ago, it would have been a little bit different because people had a tendency to think the actor was their part. I do find people who, all of a sudden, realize who is sitting in the restaurant and the first thing they react on is not necessarily, "There's that actor," but it's, "There's that killer guy."

Everybody wants a big crowd. You get amazed sometimes with certain things that millions of people are watching and you go, "Serious?! Really?!" And then, there are things that you really, really enjoy and not a lot of people are watching. It's very, very hard to predict how it works.

I'm terrified about psychic people who have their little shops.