Danish man who plays JFK in ‘Jackie’ looks uncannily like the former president
ABOUT a year and a half ago, the Danish actor Caspar Phillipson got a lead on an audition. There was some kind of John F. Kennedy film, a friend said, that Phillipson might want to go out for.
Phillipson, a 44-year- old stage and voice- over veteran — he was the Danish voice for Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka — was at the time in Istanbul for a production of “Hamlet .” So, he went back to his hotel room and uploaded an audition scene on his iPhone. A few days later, back home with his wife and children in Copenhagen, he heard from the casting agent. “She said, ‘Would you like to do the job?’ And I said: ‘Great! What is the job?’” He’d been picturing a small educational film, perhaps something made-for-television. Instead, it turned out to be “Jackie,” the critical darling that earned three Oscar nominations, including Natalie Portman’s for best actress. And just like that, one of the most quintessentially American roles portraying one of the United States’ most iconic figures? A Dane. And just like that, a role that gave Phillipson less than 10 minutes of screen time? His calling card. His destiny. The Danish JFK. “The funny thing is, I’ve now heard this both several times, both here and in Denmark,” Phillipson said while visiting Washington for a debut theatrical reading this week. “I’ve heard, ‘I never used to think you looked like a Kennedy, but now I can’t think anything else.’ Which is not exactly the sort of thing you want to hear from a casting director.” But — and this must be said — he does look just like Kennedy. Just like him.
“Just like him. It was amazing,” says Mathilde Snodgrass, the “Jackie” casting agent who had already scoured New York, Los Angeles, London and her own city of Paris, seeking JFK look-alikes who fit the pitch-perfect aesthetic the director had in mind. The team had plucked the man who played Ted Kennedy off a French news broadcast — he wasn’t an actor, he worked for a think tank — and Snodgrass was getting both creative and desperate.
“I finally decided that JFK had quite a Nordic look about him, so I decided to push the casting a little further into Europe. I sent emails and researchers into Germany, Finland, Sweden. I was using Google Translate to figure out the word for ‘doppelganger’ in every language.”
When she saw Phillipson’s audition, she immediately commenced courting him. “There had been an actor in Los Angeles who had done JFK for 10 or 15 years. He was in everything,” she explains. “But he was getting too old now. I thought, if Caspar could come with us, then he could be the next one. He could be the guy.”
When you have become suddenly famous for looking like an American president, what is the next step? Take the show on the road.
“Man, you are the spitting image,” a grey-haired man says to Phillipson, pumping his fist furiously at Martin’s Tavern in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday night, just before the theatrical reading.
“And his profi le,” says the woman next to him. “Head on, of course you see it. But even the profi le!”
Shortly after “Jackie” was released in the United States, another Dane, a journalist and historian named Anders Agner Pedersen, was preparing to release his latest book, the defi nitive biography of John F. Kennedy written in Danish. Pederson, who is based in Washington, heard about the success of his countryman and decided to reach out. They could be the guys. The Danish JFK guys.