Possibly the most imaginative and fantastic cinematic experience I had with any 2025 movie release, Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny mashes up a family-friendly monster story with kinetic action sequences, but is really about the off-kilter relationship between a frightened young girl and her hitman neighbor. Everything about it feels like it’s meant to be seen on the big screen, which is why it’s so bananas that it’s debuting nine years after Fuller and his Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen first agreed to reteam for it.
In the film, which hits theatersw on December 12, Mikkelsen portrays a very skilled assassin with a target on his back, the kind of person who doesn’t have time to save a young girl claiming the monster under her bed ate her parents. (Spoilers: it did.) It’s a role that requires both physical prowess on top of emotional depth, and with enough charisma to make the guardian-damsel dynamic feel authentic. So it says something about the actor’s abilities that Bryan Fuller wrote the script specifically for him.
The Pushing Daisies creator talked to CinemaBlend about the long journey of making Dust Bunny his directorial debut, which goes back in part to the December 2016 premiere of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. When I asked about reteaming with his Hannibal Lecter, Fuller told me:
Well, it was written for Mads, and I pitched him the story at the premiere of Rogue One as an Amazing Stories episode, and he was like, ‘Great, yes, I’ll come do it.’ And then it became a feature when we couldn’t get it through the process at Amazing Stories. It sort of lived and died at a half-dozen studios that were gonna make it, then weren’t gonna make it, then were gonna make it, and weren’t gonna make it; and maybe this actor will push it over, maybe that actor.
This story is such a time capsule. Not only does it involve the highly acclaimed Rogue One prequel, but also centers on the largely forgotten Amazing Stories reboot, which Steven Spielberg EP’d for Apple’s then-new streaming service. Fuller ended up bowing out of that project, which was no doubt disappointing at the time. But in hindsight, I think audiences are all the better for having Dust Bunny as a no-holds-barred movie instead of as an anthology installment.
However, just because Fuller wanted to make it happen immediately didn’t mean everyone else in the industry was right on his side. Despite all the genre love for Hannibal and literal global lauding for Mads Mikkelsen’s work, studio heads were hesitant for him to be the lead. The director continued:
Most of those were not wanting to bank on Mads, like ‘He’s a European star. We need an American star.’ That sort of thing. [We] finally found somebody who would greenlight it with Mads attached. For me, I wanted to see him in this role, because he can do [it all].
To Fuller’s point, Mads Mikkelsen is obviously great at pulling off chilling and threatening performances, but that’s just a piece of the puzzle, and doesn’t speak to how wide his range is. Dust Bunny certainly plays up the persona that wider audiences are familiar with, while upending it at the same time. For Fuller, that side of the actor’s skillset is what was key to this particular story.
We understood the vocabulary of Mads Mikkelsen in an assassin world, whether it’s our experience with him with Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, or any of the various kind of Marvel villains that he’s played that are deadly assassins in their own right. So we understood that he was going to come with that vocabulary. What I wanted the audience to experience with Mads in this performance is just a little bit more of who he is as a human being, because he’s such an infectious, charming man, and there is this boyish quality to him that I got to experience behind the scenes and making Hannibal.
The twinkle in the actor’s eye is unmistakable, both in Dust Bunny and in real life, and he definitely does deliver the goods that Fuller was so confident in. Some of it is certainly due to his excellent screen partners, from the wildly talented Sophie Sloan as the quicky and monster-fearing Aurora to Sigourney Weaver‘s A+ appearances as someone higher on the food chain than Mikkelsen’s character. Mikkelsen and Weaver’s scenes together are some of the most engaging in the entire movie, and are essentially just two characters talking at a table.
Can’t do that kind of thing if you’re a crappy actor, amirite? To that end, Bryan Fuller shouted out some of his favorite performances of Mads Mikkelsen’s career as a way to exemplify the fully rounded acting chops that his lead embues.
He’s so charismatic that oftentimes when we see him in this these villainous roles, they’re much more stoic, they’re much more controlled and contained. And I love his work with Anders Thomas Jensen, and the Danish films that he makes where he’s most often the fool. I mean, there are exceptions, like Riders of Justice, which is fantastic, but movies like The Green Butcher, or Men & Chicken, or The Last Viking, all have Mads playing completely counter to what we’ve come to expect, him as these kind of heavies, where he is much more of the fool, much more vulnerable, and has a deft comedy hand that gives the audience a completely different experience than that they’re used to having him with big summer blockbusters.
I would love to see Mikkelsen heading up a full-on comedy where he can get really silly with it, but if that has to be sacrified in order for Hannibal Season 4 to finally happen, so be it. But I have to think that Dust Bunny raking in box office profits would only help that killer return happen. HINT, HINT.
Check out Dust Bunny‘s trailer below to hype yourself up for it.
Regardless of what plans you might have in the next few weeks, make sure that watching Dust Bunny in theaters is one of them starting on December 12, or else there might be a hungry monster waiting under YOUR bed soon.