Mads Mikkelsen Talks About "Freezing to Death" Shooting ROGUE ONE and Calls Script "Surprisingly Unfinished"

Rogue One was one of the best Star Wars movies to come out of the last decade, but it sounds like it wasn’t a lot of fun to shoot. Actor Mads Mikkelsen spoke about his experience making the film, telling Variety that the script for the movie was “surprisingly unfinished” while filming.  

“It kept changing. One would think that that was already done. I don’t think they ever locked a draft. I think they kept working on it and improvised and went back and reshot stuff and then came up with a better idea, which is kind of livable for a character like mine.

“I mean, I had my mission. I knew what it was, but it was obviously tricky for the two young heroes, not knowing exactly what they were carrying into a room of baggage.”

Mikkelsen played Galen Erso in the film. He starred alongside actors including Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso, Diego Luna as Cassian Andor, Ben Mendelsohn as Orson Krennic, and Donnie Yen as Chirrut Îmwe.

Directed by Gareth Edwards, the Star Wars anthology film follows a band of resistance fighters as they embark on a mission to steal the plans for the Death Star.

He also noted that the scene where he says, “It must be destroyed” while water rains down on him was particularly difficult to re-shoot as the story kept changing.  

“That was a brutal, I would say day, but it was days, because there was a lot of changes in the story. We went back and forth, and it was raining.

“When you do artificial rain, it is almost impossible to do that in a long scene without having ice cold water. So I was lying there, freezing to death, trying to keep my eyes open.”

That sounds brutal! And the ever-evolving script sounds like a recipe for a bad movie, but it all turned out pretty good against all odds.