The new Netflix original movie Polar stars Mads Mikkelsen as a retiring hitman. Like all retiring hitmen in every story about retiring hitmen including the comic book on which Polar is based, Duncan Vizla (Mikkelsen) doesn’t get his 401(k) quietly. His boss (Matt Lucas) sends other assassins to kill him, so Duncan has to kill all the other assassins first.

You’ll be happy to hear that director Jonas Akerlund shows all the killings in graphic detail. In one scene, Duncan takes a drill to someone’s forehead.

“It’s not really a comic book thing,” Mikkelsen told Bloody-Disgusting. “Unfortunately, you find that head trick all over the world. Every week somebody’s doing that. A lot of the violence is doable violence. This is what people can come up with if they have imagination and they want answers. So there was nothing that was supernatural in the violence. It’s all in your face, brutal.”

Fortunately, Mikkelsen’s costar is safe. There’s little chance of an accidental lobotomy even if Mikkelsen slips.

“There is a metal plate between his skin and my drill that we don’t see,” Mikkelsen said. “I’d have to be very clumsy to do it. You can add something on his forehead, a little prosthetic piece, normally some kind of rubber. Then you will make sure the blood is seeping out from that if you hold it on the right angle. It’s tricky to make it work but they did a great job.”

Duncan himself is also subject to a lot of Polar’s extreme violence.

“Maybe the mere fact of the heaviness of the whole thing, my character’s obviously heavily wounded at one time so we couldn’t make him into a superhero that just was peaking when he was fighting,” Mikkelsen said of a climactic sequence. “He was almost collapsing throughout the whole fight, which is a different challenge. You do that barefoot on concrete was super cold. You will hurt yourself again and again, but it was a necessity for us to make it believable that a man was almost collapsing for 20 minutes.”

Duncan also gets tortured for three days straight, which was an exhausting shoot for Mikkelsen.

“Super challenging, besides just being physically draining to hang there,” he said.

“It was also super cold and as you can tell, I’m not wearing any clothes. After that, I had to go and fight in the tunnels and feel it again, facing a lot of soldiers with military boots that was obviously not able to avoid my feet all the time. Those were also some really brutal days.”

Duncan has some cool toys to help him kill, including a pair of laser gloves that control artillery remotely. Mikkelsen found he had to reign in his gestures to sell that effect.

“We tried different things and the more we did, the more we became Kung Fu-ish,” Mikkelsen said. “We didn’t want to go there. What you’re expecting is a big, big shootout, a big fight that lasts 15 minutes and they wanted him on the move. They would jump from the roofs, they will probably land in a van somewhere and continue the fight. That’s what we’re expecting, so what we wanted to do was go one, two, three, four, five, six, it was over. We thought that would be a funny and brutal way.”

Polar premieres January 25 on Netflix.