Birgitte says it’s great to be a Dane

As Scandi dramas take over our screens, Rosa Silverman talks with Birgitte Hjort Sørensen about her international success

In the countryside northwest of Copenhagen sits a 19th-century farmhouse. Outside, fairy lights twinkle in the hibernal gloom. Inside is a roaring log fire and some beautiful Scandi-looking decor.

There’s a good Danish word for all this: hygge (roughly translated as “cosy”). The home of actress Birgitte Hjort Sørensen positively drips with hygge, that lifestyle concept Brits have espoused with just the same passion they’ve been showing for Scandi-made television.

Unless this ongoing love affair with Nordic culture has passed you by, you’ll recognise Sørensen, 37, as the journalist Katrine Fønsmark from hit political drama Borgen.

She has also appeared in Game of Thrones and Pitch Perfect 2, plus a string of other TV, film and stage titles, including a 2014 episode of Midsomer Murders.

So does our recent obsession with all things Nordic seem slightly funny to the Danes?

“Yeah!” exclaims Sørensen. “Just as it was a surprise Borgen became a hit, it is still a surprise to me people have taken to this concept [of hygge] so much. It’s fantastic.”

Sørensen is about to appear as the lead in a new TV drama called Greyzone. This latest export from the Danish broadcasting stable sees the actress play a drone engineer called Victoria Rahbek. When Victoria invites a male journalist into her home to do an interview, the motherof-one is taken hostage. The man, it turns out, is a terrorist, intent on using her drone technology for his own nefarious ends.

What follows is an edge-of-the-seat thriller that explores the moral grey area of, among other things, the captor-hostage relationship. Think Scandinavian Homeland, but with more psychodrama — and subtitles. If Scandi noir had already broken the “dead girl and moody detective” mould of Scandi drama, Greyzone is likely to give outsiders yet another perspective on the breadth of the region’s offerings. Which, believes Sørensen, can only be a good thing.

“What’s wonderful is that the success of The Killing, Borgen and The Bridge, all Danish Broadcasting Corporation products, has been so big and people are so interested in Danish drama now that more players have come to the field,” says Sørensen. “Because we’re such a small country it’s incredibly exciting and . . . it’s probably given us confidence because I think we’ve always felt —

I at least — felt like a bit of an underdog . . . always looking up to Britain and the US.”

Considering the plotline of her latest venture, it is brave of Sørensen to invite a journalist into her home, I suggest. She laughs as she passes her baby daughter to her partner, Kristian Ladegaard-Pedersen, a television writer and producer.

Baby Karoline, almost 6 months, is Sørensen’s first child, and she is on 10-month maternity leave. The idea of maternity and paternity leave is “something we [Danes] are more used to and is integrated more in our society than what you have,” says Sørensen.

“Years back, I spoke to a British colleague and she said ‘I can’t afford to have kids because to have them taken care of is so expensive’.”

Indeed, while Brits wring their hands about the cost of childcare, Denmark has a partial-fee system in which parents pay a maximum of 30 per cent of the cost of childcare.

Utopian? Well, Denmark has been ranked the happiest country in the world multiple times, so maybe.

But while the British may look at everything from Danish social provision to the country’s culture and lifestyle with a mixture of envy and admiration, Sørensen says the Danes look to Britain aspirationally, too. “Yeah, we do,” she says, citing

British cultural output like Sherlock, The Night Manager and The Fall as personal favourites. The thing that seems to translate in both nations is social media and a permanent need to be on it. Sørensen has acquired a large following (more than 49,000 on Instagram) but tries to keep it at arm’s length. Some of the teenage fans Sørensen acquired after Pitch Perfect

2 in 2015 lament that she doesn’t respond. “[They will write] . . . ‘I’m sure she just doesn’t care about us’, and it breaks my heart. But I can’t interact with everybody.”

However, in Denmark, where Sørensen is very well known, the fame game is paradoxically easier.

“Danes don’t make a fuss about celebrities. I’m approached much more in the UK,” she admits.

I wonder if she’s ever experienced the dark side of fame? She mentions a time when tabloids screen-grabbed a nude scene she appeared in in

Borgen and ran it alongside something she had once said about having no problem with nudity.

“It just becomes sordid,” she says. “It is hurtful, because it feels like you’re being picked on in front of everyone.”

Still, the MeToo movement has made it to Danish shores, so there’s hope things are improving. “I haven’t experienced anything very grave but I’ve experienced small-scale stuff,” she says.

She describes one incident that occurred when she was cycling to a filming location for Borgen.

“I stopped at a red light and there was a van next to me honking. It was some of the crew members, so I waved.

“When I arrived one said, ‘We’d recognise that butt anywhere’. It makes you self-conscious.”

It is still a surprise to me people have taken to this concept [of hygge] so much. It’s fantastic.

Birgitte Hjort Sørensen