How do you act drunk on screen?

Danish film Another Round features performances of drunkenness so convincing that it's tempting to believe the actors were tipsy themselves. Nicholas Barber finds out.

Sometimes you wonder if actors are acting at all. You know deep down that they're reciting lines from a screenplay, and being guided by a director who's sitting nearby. But, at their most convincing, they can make you think that they are genuinely upset/euphoric/madly in love, and that there's no pretence involved. The latest film to prompt this kind of uncertainty is Another Round (Druk), directed by Thomas Vinterberg (Festen, The Hunt). Denmark's entry for the best international feature category at the Oscars, Vinterberg's piquant mid-life crisis tragicomedy stars Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale, Doctor Strange) as one of four jaded teachers who experiment with being under the influence of alcohol throughout the working day. Their intoxication seems so utterly authentic – one scene, featuring Mads Mikkelsen drunk-dancing on a pier, has been shared widely on social media for this reason. Whether they are mildly tiddly or wildly blotto, some viewers will ask themselves: were the actors really drunk?

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The answer is an emphatic no. "We were firm about that from the beginning," Mikkelsen tells BBC Culture via Zoom. "If you do one or two scenes in a film when you are supposed to be very drunk, you might have a beer to get the feel of it, but we were doing this every day for 60 days, so that would be a no-go. There were also days when we would be drunk for three hours in one scene, and then driving a car sober in the next. You can't do that if you've had a beer." Vinterberg goes further. On a video call from Copenhagen, he dismisses the idea of actors getting drunk for drunk scenes as "amateurism". But how else can you be believably pie-eyed in a film? "As with anything that looks real on screen," he says, "it's a result of hard work and a lot of repetition."

We have all heard about actors who were sloshed while playing sober characters. But if you are playing sloshed characters, it seems, it's best to be sober. A special mention in this regard must go to Richard E Grant, the star of cult British film Withnail & I, because he had never been drunk in his life until he made the film. The actor is medically intolerant to alcohol, but Bruce Robinson, the writer-director, felt that he should have some experience of Withnail's booziness. Grant dutifully worked his way through two bottles of champagne, and was retching in agony for hours while his wife asked, "Why don't you just try acting">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });