Mads Mikkelsen: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

It's rare that any film series can actually get better over the course of three films, but the films that made both Mikkelsen and Nicholas Winding Refn defy tradition by doing just that. In the first two, Mikkelsen plays Copenhagen heroin dealer Tonny who starts the first film as a side-kick and graduates to the lead in the second.

Having played second fiddle in the first movie - and taking a kicking for supposedly ratting his friend out to police - the Tonny of Pusher II blossoms. He is hauntingly fierce and there's a brutal honesty to Mikkelsen's performance that cuts right through the more melodramatic moments in the film.

He's a villain, that much is certain, but even in his most despicable moments, he's entirely sympathetic, and there's very much a sense of Refn building up his knack for mythologising "cool" characters here that he'd thrive with later in Drive.