Mads Mikkelsenis keeping himself very busy these days. He has a mystery role in the upcomingRogue One: A Star Wars Story, which is about to undergo fairly substantial reshoots and there is still some hope thatHannibalwill get renewed somewhere after NBC canceled it. He will also be the bad guy in the upcomingDoctor Strange, but we don’t know who he is playing. However, in a recent interviewMikkelsenshed some light on his mystery role claiming his character might not really be all that bad.
Speaking withYahoo! Movies,Mikkelsentalked a lot about the upcoming Marvel Studios film and specifically about his role in the movie. We have known for quite some time that he is playing the villain inDoctor Strange, but according toMads Mikkelsenhe isn’t a villain in the traditional sense. Here is what he had to say.
“He’s not avillainin that way - he’s a man who believes in something else than the hero. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to make the planet look wonderful or he wants to save the world as well, but he has a different way of doing it. He is the antagonist, of course, but he’s not necessarily wrong.”
The idea thatMikkelsenisn’t playing a straight up villain sort of makes sense in the scope ofDoctor Strange. The story ofDoctor Strangefollows a formerneurosurgeonnamed Stephen Strange, played byBenedict Cumberbatch, who ruins his hands in a car wreck and eventually finds The Ancient One in his journey to cure himself, which leads him down the path to becoming The Sorcerer Supreme. At that point, Strange essentially becomes the Earth’s protector from other dimensions, andMikkelsenwill likely not be from our world as we know it, so his perspective will be skewed.
Doctor Strangewill be a very different kind of Marvel movie, withhorrordirectorScott Derricksonat the helm and it will be introducing straight up magic into the MCU. Not only that, but the source material is like nothing we have seen before and though the movie has clearly taken a lot from the comics, things had to be toned down a bit.Mikkelsenalso commented a bit about what we can expect in terms of tone fromDoctor Strange.
“If you look at the comic books, the comic books are quite different [to otherMarvel stories]. I think that the film will be different from the other [Marvel] films that we’ve seen, but not as different as the books are, because that was basically the ’60s and ’70s - it was more like an acid trip. We’ve taken that fascination of the time into something we can relate to today. So you still have the energy, you still have the colours, you still have the madness, but you also have something you can identify with. I think that was a necessity - if not, you would just make a crazy film. But you still have it there - you have all the action, all the good ingredients you get in a Marvel film, but it will have a different flavour, that’s for sure.”
As of right now we mostly only have the teaser trailer forDoctor Strangeto go on, butDerricksonrecently confirmed that the film will have a presence at San Diego Comic Con, so we should learn a lot more next month. It is very possible we will finally learn whoMikkelsenis playing at that point, but for now we will just have to continue to wonder and speculate.Doctor Strangeis set for a November 4 release.
