Mads Mikkelsen has faced plenty of monsters on screen, but 'Dust Bunny' asks him to confront one hiding under a child’s bed. Drawn to director Brian Fuller’s imaginative pitch and the film’s blend of fantasy and fear, Mikkelsen signed on to play an enigmatic neighbor pulled into a young girl’s desperate mission to track down the creature she believes killed her mother. To dive deeper into the experience, Mikkelsen sat down with Metro to talk all about Fuller’s directorial debut.
The reason I wanted to do it was to work with Brian once again. I don't know anyone whose brain is working on the level that his does. So that was the key reason. He pitched me the story, it was an elaborate pitch and I loved it. But I also knew once I got the script, it would be even more elaborate and everything would make sense—and that was no disappointment at all. I loved his story. And then I met with Sophie (Sloan), the little girl, and it was just a rollercoaster from there.
We wanted to keep it like that and we wanted [him] to be anybody's neighbor seen through a child's eyes. Going down memory lane and knowing everything about him would probably lose the magic somehow. So we wanted him to be enigmatic and someone that kind of exists in her imagination even though he's real... he’s a character who doesn't have great social skills, I would say. So they end up having some quite interesting dialogues.
It was great, and it was also, of course, very important. The character that I do play... he's scrutinizing her a lot and he's quite harsh on her. So it was important for us that she knew me and she also realized that once they say action, I will be different. And when they say cut, I'll be myself again. And she just had to feel comfortable around me, and that was the main job with her in that sense. She's obviously just a little girl, but she behaved like an actress in the sense that she was so professional and genuine.
That's where our skills kick in, I guess. It's real acting. We have to imagine what's going on for you. Normally, we react to each other and here, there is only a tennis ball. So we have to use our childish imagination as well. It's fun. It's not something I'm super used to, but I've done a few of them now, so I get familiar with the tennis ball.
As you can tell, when you see the film and everything else he's done, he's super detail-oriented—I like that. Down to the little button on a costume to the way you say a certain line. He's creating this, and everything is inside his head. For us to lean up against him is a luxury because as a showrunner, you will not be on deck in the same way that he was here. So I was quite honored to be part of his directorial debut here.
Brian has his own style. He creates a universe and inside that universe, there's a ton of things you can get away with, but you also have to pick up on his tonality. And that goes for all the actors. Once we hit that tonality together, it's quite obvious when there's a time for something to be funny, something to be scary, something to be sad, it comes fluidly. But we have to hit his tonality. And I think everybody did that because once you've seen something from Brian, you see what kind of path [it] is going down.
We are hoping, obviously, that we've done a family film where you can take your kids to see it. The monster under the bed is an evergreen story in the sense that children fear something...they fear the dark, or there might be some unexplainable thing they fear. So the monster is always there, and to talk about that monster is definitely a good start.
‘Dust Bunny’ hits theaters Dec. 12.
