Lars Mikkelsen

He lets the other actor finish. Then he waits a beat longer than is comfortable, and the scene tilts towards him. That is most of what Lars Mikkelsen does, and directors in Denmark and abroad have spent nearly twenty years casting him as the man everyone else answers to, a politician, a magnate, a president, a grand admiral, because a man who does not need to hurry is frightening in a way that shouting never is. He said of his Sherlock villain that "he doesn’t even need to raise his voice to dominate people", and that could stand for most of his work.

The career comes in two halves. The Danish half made him: Troels Hartmann in The Killing (2007), the part that brought him and the series to notice outside Denmark, and then Borgen, where he arrives in the third series as Søren Ravn, an economist, at the point where the programme has just made a large change and takes a few episodes to settle. The international half found him a narrower job. Sherlock (2014) gave him Charles Augustus Magnussen, House of Cards (2015–2018) Viktor Petrov, the Russian president, Ahsoka (2023) Grand Admiral Thrawn, a part he had already voiced, and Frankenstein (2025) Captain Anderson. He has kept working in Danish theatre and television throughout, which looks less like sentiment than like self-preservation.

Frankenstein is the useful test. Guillermo del Toro's version opens on a ship stuck in Arctic ice, and Anderson is the man who hears Victor's story first and the Creature's later. It is a part made almost entirely of listening, and Mikkelsen listens better than many actors act: his face takes the story in without telling us what to make of it. We came out wanting more of him, and slightly cross that a film with 150 minutes to spare had found so few of them for him. That is the trouble with the international work in general. The parts are good and the screen time is not.

The criticism is easy to make and mostly fair. He is asked to be powerful and hard to read, he obliges, and the risk is that the stillness turns into a costume he can put on without thinking. His Danish work, Borgen and the lead in Ride Upon the Storm (2017–2018), gives him an ensemble and time, and he is a fuller actor when he has both. If you know him only as somebody's villain, start with Borgen, and watch what he does when nobody in the scene is afraid of him.