How do you act drunk on screen?

To help themselves appear properly stunned, the actors circled around before each take – well, some of them. “I don’t think Mads did that,” Vinterberg notes. “It was below him. They also used “very painful” eye drops to give them cloudy red eyes and the shoulder pads needed to hit walls. Being blind drunk can be dangerous after all. In one of the most sublime films in cinema about someone who is dazzled, One AM, Charlie Chaplin’s genius for the slapstick allows him to fall dramatically without breaking his bones. On Another Round, the solution was to have protective mats on the floor, just out of sight, so the actors could fall down whenever the mood took them. “Very drunk people don’t use their hands to stop when they fall,” says Mikkelsen, “they just use their teeth or their face, so we wanted to have mats everywhere.

According to Vinterberg, however, “the most important thing” when playing someone pickled is not to fool the viewer but to fool yourself. In the opening scene of Another Round, teens knock over crates of beer and sprint around a lake. The beers were all alcohol-free, Vinterberg says, but the young actors were so thrilled with the atmosphere that they “went crazy.” The same kind of hypnosis happened to the lead actors during a loud scene in a pub. “It’s an illusion. Your brain treats it like, ‘I’m in the environment where I’m normally in this kind of state,’ and it brings you into that state.” So maybe, in a way, the actors got drunk for the drunken scenes: it’s just that they did it without a drop of alcohol.

Another Round will be released internationally on February 5, 2021.

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