Following his breakthrough with the 2006 film Casino Royale, Mads Mikkelsen has established himself as a highly skilled and versatile actor in Hollywood. Over the years, he has starred in several genres and has portrayed a range of characters on the screen. One such character also includes his role in the 2009 action adventure Valhalla Rising. The movie features him as an enslaved man dubbed One Eye.
While the movie was unable to make it big at the box office, it received generally positive reviews from critics. The performance of its leading star also received praise. However, it was not easy bringing the mute medieval warrior to life on-screen. The actor recalled the hardships of filming the 2009 movie, especially due to the mosquitoes like bugs during his recent interview.
Mads Mikkelsen Struggled With Bugs While Filming Valhalla Rising
Mads Mikkelsen reunited with the Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn for the 2006 action adventure, Valhalla Rising. The movie features him as an enslaved and mute medieval warrior, referred to as One-Eye, who escapes his captors with a boy and joins a group of Crusaders in search of the Holy Land.
It was entirely shot in Scotland, and the lead star opened up about the troubles of filming the movie in the extreme environment. During an interview with GQ, the Pusher actor shared one of his eyes was covered with prosthetics to fit the character’s description. He also stated that he couldn’t see anything through while sharing that the whole process was “super annoying” for a lot of reasons.
The actor said that it was either raining or “baking sunshine” in Scotland. “But when it was baking sunshine, they had all these bushies in the mountains that were full of these little animals called ‘Midges,'” he said. The Hunt star described them as the “biting kind of mosquitoes” with jaws that often got into his eyes.
He shared that when the prosthetics for his eye were done on the set, those mosquito-like creatures went into his eyes. Mikkelsen shared that he constantly rubbed his eyes in an effort to get rid of them. “So I would have like five or six little animals trying to eat me inside the eye,” he said before adding, “Yeah! And it was a pain.” After filming in Scotland for the 2009 movie, the filmmaker was reportedly planning to make its sequel in Tokyo.
Nicolas Winding Refn Talked About a Valhalla Rising Sequel
Although Mads Mikkelsen’s Valhalla Rising was not a huge commercial hit, it was praised by critics and gained positive reviews. The filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn was also reported to be working on a sequel to the 2009 film. According to a 2013 report from Indiewire, the actor shared that he was planning a sequel for Valhalla Rising with the Fantastic Beast star.
The filmmaker wanted to revisit Mikkelsen’s character One-Eye in a sequel that would have been based in Tokyo. The sequel was also reported to go back to One-Eye’s origins and would be about “the future.” However, Winding Refn did not explain how the medieval warrior came to modern-day Tokyo. No further updates have been shared about the Valhalla Rising sequel so far.
Valhalla Rising is available on Prime Video.
Source: GQ
