Interviewer: Did your parents appreciate having such a bad guy at home?
Mads: I think that after having a son that didn’t make any money as a dancer for 10 years, they were pretty happy that I could pay my rent. I think that my parents have always been very supportive of what we’ve done, no questions asked.
There’s a lot of stories in the beginning, when I did the first Pusher film. I was bald, I had tattoos on the back of my head and everywhere. They didn’t come off, we drew them up every week, but they were always there.
I lived at that time, for some strange reason, in a quite posh area of Copenhagen. I had to bring my daughter to kindergarten, and they had no idea that I was an actor. When I brought my daughter there with the tattoos, all the parents were just moving like an alley. “Don’t talk to that kid, don’t mess with that kid. That kid is dangerous.”
So there was kind of a couple of years of trying to explain. And my daughter had just learnt to speak a little and she said, well they asked her, “What does your father do?” She said, “My father is in jail!” Because I was shooting a scene in a jail. “My father is in jail and my mom just got her leg stolen!” Because my wife had broken her knee and she had lost one of her crutches. So that became, “she got her leg stolen.” So we were like the family from hell for a couple of years. Eventually they understood what I did. [x