‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’: Mads Mikkelsen on Voller’s Aspirations To Correct Hitler’s Mistakes
Doctor Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) in Lucasfilm’s INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
With Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny set to screen at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, we are merely a few days away from having the first real sense of what we can expect from this movie and the audience’s reaction to it. The film, which brings back Harrison Ford for one last ride into the sunset as the iconic title hero, was featured in Entertainment Weekly‘s Summer Preview via an interview with Mads Mikkelsen.
As we saw in the trailer, Mikkelsen will play the lead villain, Voller, a member of Operation Paperclip, which was a real effort by the US to bring Nazi scientists into American agencies to exploit them for their own purposes (Apple’s For All Mankind also touched on this briefly). Now, obviously, his actual motivation in the film is not really true to history (and the character isn’t adapted from any particular individual either), and while we don’t know a whole lot about it, we do are aware that he will be looking for the titular McGuffin. Here’s what Mikkelsen said about his motivations:
“I think the passion for what he does and passion for what he’s looking for, without giving too much away, and the passion for him knowing that this can make the world a better place — all that I can identify with. [But] what does a better place look like? This is where it gets tricky. So I just have to leave that out, and then I can replace the end goal with something else [in my mind]. And then it’s recognizable, for me at least.”
Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Image from Total Film Magazine.
Apparently, the character will be of the belief that there could have been easy fixes to some mistakes made by the Nazis when they lost the War, and he might have some ideas about how to correct them now:
“Well, if you’re a believer into a certain ideology, obviously, your end game would be that that ideology will be the winning hand, right? And that can come in many shapes and forms. I do think that he disagreed with Hitler on a lot of things. And [his ideas] might even be a better version than Hitler’s, but still, one man deciding everything is never a good solution.”
Voller’s accent will not be as clichéd as what you might expect from the average American movie about Nazis. We will first meet him during the opening 25-minute flashback sequence, and he will be meeting back up with Indiana Jones in the ’60s; Mikkelsen described the two characters as “men stuck in time”. And speaking of Ford’s character, the Danish actor shared that he was able to meet him before Ford himself, as he first saw him stepping out of the trailer in full costume, hat and whip included:
“Actually, I met Indiana Jones before I met Harrison Ford, because he stepped out of his trailer after he had a costume fitting. And he stepped out with the hat, the jacket, and the whip, which was fun. There’s an overlap between Harrison and his character, right?
Harrison, you get to know him. He’s like that, but he’s also a little what you expect him to be and what you’re hoping him to be. So maybe he’s already a character himself, by just being Harrison. And I do like that character, a lot.”
Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) in Lucasfilm’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. ©2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
He said he grew up watching Indiana Jones movies, more so than Star Wars or even James Bond. But working with Ford on set was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for him:
“Besides that, he’s just a fantastic actor. He knows exactly what he’s doing wherever the camera is. And he doesn’t use enormous means to tell a story. For me, he’s like Buster Keaton, who kind of invented the close-up. He didn’t run to the camera, he made the camera come to him. And it’s wonderful to be that close to see him work. It was just a wonderful experience for me.”
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will open in theaters worldwide on June 30. Keep an eye on social media reactions on Thursday after the Cannes premiere!
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
