Bryan Fuller Wrote DUST BUNNY Role SPECIFICALLY for Mads Mikkelsen

Fannibals rejoice! Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller and star Mads Mikkelsen have re-teamed for Fuller’s charming genre-defying feature film directorial debut Dust Bunny, which had its world premiere last night as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness section. Bryan Fuller

Fuller’s Dust Bunny follows a young girl named Aurora (newcomer Sophie Sloan) who hires the mysterious man living across the hall (Mikkelsen) to kill the monster that lives under her bed after it eats her parents. Although the film is a whimsical and macabre fairytale, with shades of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children, and even the John Wick franchise, at the end of his introduction Fuller reminded viewers that sometimes “the monsters are under the same roof as you,” alluding to his rocky relationship with his own father.

Aurora’s parents might “get got” by the big bad bunny under her bed early on in the film, but she finds a surrogate in Mikkelsen, whose character is referred to only as “Resident 5B.” The two form a chosen family while doing normal things, like eating bunny-shaped dim sum, and less normal things like packing up a dead body into panda bear suitcases, adding a tender undercurrent to the film’s more gruesome elements.  

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During a conversation with Nerdist the following day, Fuller shared that he wrote the Dust Bunny role specifically for his friend Mikkelsen, sharing that several scenes in the film allow the Danish actor to show his “playful and rambunctious” side, adding that Mikkelsen is the kind of person that when they go bowling steals people’s shoes, “just to get them to chase him down the street.” (Yes, Fuller revealed Mikkelsen had actually done this on an outing.)

Of their collaboration on Dust Bunny, Fuller explained of Mikkelsen:

He’s such a playful, boyish man. This movie, I couldn’t have done with any other actor. He kept stepping up every point of the production in a way that was so touching, and if I talk too much about it, I’ll cry. He just kept having my back in a way that an actor that I hadn’t worked with before wouldn’t be able to do. There’s a fight in the hallway with a guy who has a Wednesday Adams – the Christina Ricci version – style wallpaper outfit. We were frustrated with what we were seeing from the stunt team. Mads has more stunt experience than anybody, and so we choreographed it with my phone and two Bruce Lee action figures in a mock-up of the set. We went through the sequence like boys, doing little boy things as we worked out where we’d put the feet for the feet sequence and the unscrewing of the sconce and those types of details. We did that in an afternoon in the hotel. Then we filmed it with him acting it out with me doing the camera. Then we gave that to the stunt team. He’s been around a while and has this rock star energy about him, but he’s so warm and caring. I loved working with him on Hannibal, but we reached a new level of intimacy and support on this movie that I was surprised and delighted by.

Dust Bunny, which also co-stars Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson, and Sheila Atim, will be in theaters on December 5th. Check back for our full conversation with Fuller about Dust Bunny in December. 

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