Grindelwald, the villain of the Fantastic Beasts series, has changed three faces in three parts.
In the first film, Grindelwald disguised as the American Auror Parsivar, starred Colin Farrell, and did not reveal his true face until the end of the film, turning into the image of Depp.
As a result, the Depp drama was plagued by domestic violence scandals, and Warner Bros. had to change roles. For this evil and glamorous character, there is only one suitable candidate - Max Mickelson.
In the American drama "Hannibal", Max played the "ogre" Dr. Hannibal, and became famous. Although there was Anthony Hopkins in front of the pearl, while "Uncle Ba" performed a different taste. He plays Hannibal, who is calm and elegant, accompanied by classical music, and uses intricate Western cooking methods to commit the most brutal crimes.
From "007" to "Star Wars" sequels, from Marvel to the wizarding world, Uncle Mai has become a villain professional in Hollywood's big productions. The exotic and axe-like resolute face and complex and changeable temperament have made Uncle Mai's charm break through the big screen, and there are countless circles of fans. In addition to commercial films, he took it lightly and perfectly mastered literary films, winning the Cannes film emperor with "The Hunt" and winning the Oscar with "Alcohol Project".
He is the Danish national treasure actor - Max Mickelson.
Uncle Mai's acting career can be summarized by the late success of the big instrument. When he was a teenager, Uncle Mai practiced gymnastics hard and wanted to embark on the path of professional athletes. As a result, he switched to the Dance Academy, and professional dancers have been doing it for nearly a decade. When he went to the drama school to start further performance, he was already running three, and the classmates around him were one round younger than himself.
At that time, his brother Russ was already famous in the Danish film industry, and he led his younger brother into the show business circle. In 1996, Uncle Mai, who was still in drama school, received his first big-screen role in his life, playing a criminal in the crime movie "The End of the Road", with a very subversive image of bald head and tattoo.
The film eventually led to a series in which he continued to play The role of Tony, winning three awards for Best Actor. In the film, the scene where he looks in the mirror is also compared by a writer to Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.
Later, Uncle Mai took over the crime TV series "First Squad" as a policeman, and this hit series made Max Mickelson a household name in Denmark.
In the first ten years of his acting career, Uncle Mai's popularity was limited to Denmark, and he was unknown in the international film world. So, after he was selected for 007: Casino Royale, even Daniel Craig was surprised and asked if he had made a peach deal and went through the back door to get the role. Jokes aside, the one-eyed dragon villain played by Uncle Mai is very successful. He shed "blood and tears" at the poker table and tied up 007 to abuse, these scenes are deeply rooted in people's hearts.
Since then, Uncle Mai has become internationally famous, but at that time he did not enter Hollywood, but stayed in Europe to cultivate independent films. He hopes that one day Denmark can also make immortal works like "Taxi Driver" or "Poor Streets", and he will always work hard for this.
Not minding the production cost and not minding the partnering, Uncle Mai began to pursue the expression of film art. He said that it was in the shooting of small-budget independent films that he was able to always remember his original love of acting.
In 2012, he dedicated the most accomplished work of his acting career, "The Hunt", in which he played a teacher who was framed by children and lost his reputation, winning the Cannes Award for Best Actor. This film is the first Danish work to enter the main competition unit since 1998. It is no exaggeration to say that Uncle Mai did bring a revival to Danish cinema.
After "The Hunt", the mainstream drama "Hannibal" made him officially enter the Hollywood show business. He admits that Hannibal, played by Anthony Hopkins, is perfect, but he has a different understanding, arguing that Hannibal is not a typical psychopath and serial killer, but most like a fallen angel— the closest to Satan, hannibal Lecter saw beauty in death.
Indeed, in the final presentation of this series, the existence of aesthetics can be seen everywhere. Uncle Mai was also called "Uncle Pull" by the audience, and he was too much of a CP with Will.
In large-scale commercial films, he is crazy and evil; in small language literary films, he feels literature and art. Although he is over 50 years old, Uncle Mai's unique charm has conquered a wide variety of audiences.
The root of this unique charm lies in the fact that Uncle Mai did not and was unwilling to accept any artistic shackles. Since 007, he has been so obsessed with interpreting the dark side of human nature that he cannot help himself from discussing the extremely perverted torture scenes with Craig, so that the director has to stop.
"The Hunt" is the same, the story is already very heavy, but Uncle Mai wants a darker ending, so that the male protagonist he plays is directly shot at the end of the film. It was still the director Winterberg who was distressed by the audience, although he made this version, but it was only placed in the edited version of the Blu-ray DVD. Referring to cp in "Hannibal", Uncle Mai is also happy to admit that Hannibal and Will have an ambiguous relationship. According to him, the reason why the two did not shoot intimate shots was mainly because they found the hazy beauty more attractive.
Probably because he has played too many memorable and brilliant roles, when Uncle Mai starred in the decent Marvel villain Caseillas in 2016's "Doctor Strange", the audience felt that it was not exciting enough. But in this film, uncle Mai, who is fifty years old, has almost no substitute in the action scenes in the film, which has won praise from Yishui.
In 2020, Uncle Mai and Winterberg collaborated again, and this "Alcohol Project" eventually won the Academy Award for Best International Film. He contributed to his superb acting skills, especially the free dance at the end of the film, which is called "epic".
Along the way, Uncle Mai's understanding of the film industry has become more and more sober. The bigger the investment, the bigger the market, the bigger the stakes, and the greater the cost. He said he found that when the cost of a film exceeded a certain boundary, the film was no longer the director's personal work, and there were too many things that the director and the actors could not control.
This sobriety also allowed him to maintain a low-key and simple private life. He has been with his wife, Jacobson, for 35 years, and the two spend most of their lives quietly in Copenhagen.
American pop diva Rihanna invited him to shoot a MV, but he agreed to it at the instigation of his already adult son. Funny enough, Rihanna also gave him a villain role.
Taking over the filming of "Fantastic Beasts", it is also because her daughter has loved the Harry Potter series since she was a child, and she has helped her children realize their dreams. Warner is said to have quickly contacted him just a few days after announcing the end of his partnership with Depp, and it turned out that he was originally the first choice of director David Yates.
Uncle Mai is now nearly sixty years old, but his super high plasticity makes him still explore his acting limits, and the new work he participated in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is about to be released.
Authoritative American film critic A. O. Scott's evaluation of him is the most penetrating: in Hollywood, Uncle Mai uses a face to confuse everyone, and the on-screen temperament is absolutely trustworthy; in Denmark, he has transformed into a real film superstar, interpreting the truth of art, he is a symbol of danish film revival.