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Ride Upon The Storm star Lars Mikkelsen on finding faith at home and fame abroad
BARRY DIDCOCK
YOU wouldn’t expect someone raised as an atheist by Communists in a 1970s commune to have a particular affinity with religion, and 55-year-old Danish actor Lars Mikkelsen didn’t for many years. But when he was cast as high-ranking churchman Johannes Krogh in Ride Upon The Storm, he had a conversion of sorts – not a Damascene moment, perhaps, but a gradual awareness that something was changing in his life.
“I was in the Copenhagen Boy’s Choir, so from about the fifth grade to the seventh I was in church during most of the services but, as a family we were Communists, the church had no impact,” he says, laughing heartily at the memory. “It was a workers’ community – at that point that was a big movement in Denmark – so religion had no impact at all. The two ideologies don’t really go well together, so in that sense, yeah, I was an atheist.”
But climbing into the stern, formal
garb of a member of the Lutheran Church of Denmark, and trying to inhabit the character of man whose family had served that church for generations, had an effect on him that he couldn’t have expected. “I do now have a firm belief,” he says over the phone from Copenhagen. “I do relate.”
And it was playing Johannes that did that?
HE laughs again. “That’s what my wife says. She says: ‘You went too far in a role again’. The costume does give you a lot of power and of course spending time with the material, especially doing research and talking to priests and digging into that community, made me feel at ease with my own faith, really.
It’s a difficult time to say you have faith, though isn’t it? You have to lean into that small naivety that it takes to give away control. But it feels gratifying doing it.”
Created by Adam Price, the man who gave us Borgen, Ride Upon The Storm follows the strict, misogynistic Johannes, his wife Elisabeth (played by Mikkelsen’s co-star in The Killing, Ann Eleonora Jørgensen) and their two sons through a series of domestic crises. Season one found Johannes being passed over for promotion to the post of Bishop of Copenhagen, his marriage to Elisabeth in difficulty, and his relationship with son Kristian deteriorating fast.
Through that prism, Price also looked at wider issues such as Denmark’s involvement in overseas military campaigns, the relationship between church and state, and the country’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers.
Season two of the Emmy Awardwinning drama starts tomorrow night on Channel 4 and finds even Johannes struggling with his faith. As for plot twists, Mikkelsen isn’t giving much away. “It’s about the consequences of what has happened [in season one],” he says.
“What will the people take away from their experiences and what will they learn from it? And what impact will it have on their faith, or lack of faith?”
Mikkelsen is clear that Johannes Krogh is the most complex character he has ever had to play, and it’s no accident that it took a home-grown production and a talent like Adam Price to hand it to him. However, like many of his fellow Scandinavian actors, he’s now recognisable far beyond his own country, thanks in large part to the success of a wave of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic productions which have been shown in the UK and US and, in many cases, remade by companies in those countries.
Although younger brother Mads landed himself a plum role in Casino Royale in 2006 and has since featured in films such as Doctor Strange and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Mikkelsen first came to the attention of British audiences when he played Troels Hartmann in The Killing.
He also appeared in a later series of Borgen. Then, in 2014, he was cast as uber-baddie Charles Augustus Magnusson in Steven Moffat’s crowdpleasing Sherlock and so began a run of English-speaking roles which have catapulted him to international fame.
FOR four seasons of US political drama House Of Cards he played Russian president Viktor Petrov (another role for which he “went deep”, even researching the Russian language) and more recently he was Stregobor in Netflix’s adaptation of The Witcher novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, Poland’s answer to George RR Martin. The streaming giant doesn’t release viewing figures as a rule but where they smash records they make an exception: The Witcher, it was revealed recently, has reached an audience of 76 million households.
“I don’t know how to relate to that,” says Mikkelsen when I tell him. “It’s just a number really. But it’s nice that it has had such an impact. I’m off in a month to do a second season and I’m looking forward to that. I think it’s a show that’s slowly finding its feet and it’s a quality thing. People really love it.
“It’s about four times bigger than any show we’d do here but at the same time it’s the same thing you do when you get in front of the camera. You have to work with the actors in front of you, so you don’t really think how big it is.”
International profiles and blockbusting fantasy series are all well and good, however, but Mikkelsen does still keep one eye on his native stomping ground, and he sees in the dominance of streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon an opportunity for home-grown dramas which are culturally specific and tailored to a niche rather than a generic audience. Scottish producers take note.
“Ride Upon The Storm is a series that nobody would make,” he says. Not because it’s bad but because “it’s about relations, it’s heavy, it isn’t made to entertain. So if we’re clever, we’ll do those [sorts of] things. We’ll find that specific thing to do so that we don’t do what everybody else is doing.”
THREE YEARS IN HELL: THE BREXIT CHRONICLES Fintan O’Toole
Head of Zeus, £20
THEY’RE not talking about Brexit any more; they’ve got coronavirus instead,” I overheard a nurse say on a recent hospital visit. It is true that coronavirus has eclipsed Brexit, and it is Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole’s misfortune to publish Three Years in Hell: the Brexit Chronicles at this moment of indifference to the clusterbourach that has preoccupied, nay obsessed, us for the last three years.
But at some point, coronavirus will be over, and – economically and spiritually weaker – we shall once again have to pick over the wreckage that Brexit has wrought. Above all, we shall have to come to terms with ourselves in all our complicated, divided delusion and rage.
Robert Burns has apposite words for the occasion. “O, wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!” might have written about Brexit.
For its advocates, Brexit is a bold and glorious popular uprising, a glinting silver sword slashing through Brussels red tape to set a proud nation free. But in the almost four years since the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU), the world beyond this sceptred isle has watched dumbstruck as the Mother of Democracy rounds on her children, and the sensible, tweedy British ditch pragmatism for dogma and sink into xenophobia.
No one sees us more clearly than an
“intimate outsider”, which is how O’Toole styles himself. And so it is that Irish journalists, with their long experience of the violence and tragedy that nationalism entails, and their knowledge of our fatal blindspots, have dissected our implosion with a sharper scalpel than home-grown commentators.
None has been more forensic than O’Toole, winner of the Orwell Prize and European Press Prize for his columns on Brexit in the Irish Times, Guardian and New York Review of Books.
Three Years in Hell brings together those columns to describe “in real-time reflection” the slow-motion catastrophe that unfolded between the Brexit referendum and Boris Johnson’s election in December last year.
The book is a sort of sequel to the best-selling Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, in which O’Toole deconstructed the political ideas behind Brexit. Of that book, the
English novelist Jonathan Coe wrote, “He has nailed us to the floor with a nine-inch nail.”
He does that here too, though we may well ask who “we” are. From Theresa May’s crackle-voiced bid to shove a square peg in a round hole with her backstop, through Spectator journalist Rod Liddle’s inchoate rantings and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s “study in powerlessness”, O’Toole lays bare our national shame.
Above all, he minces current prime minister, Boris Johnson, a serial philanderer wedded to mendacity, whose previous career as a – gulp! – journalist flourished only after he’d been fired by the The Times for inventing lurid quotes for a dull story. Johnson became the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, a position he used to turn everything from crisps to condoms into a battering ram with which to pulverise the EU’s standing, with little regard for the truth.
To manufacture outrage in newspaper columns is one thing; to lead your country into an abyss you neither understand nor wholly endorse is quite another, and O’Toole shows that this is what Johnson did.
On joining the Leave campaign after much shilly-shallying on the issue, he told David Cameron he believed Brexit would be crushed. He also thought the UK could still have a seat on the European Council after leaving the EU – a belief O’Toole correctly fingers as “mind-melting”.
“Not only was Johnson unconvinced that he was taking the right side on one of the most important questions his country has faced since the Second World War, but he was unaware of the most basic consequences of Brexit,” he writes.
The trouble with Brexit, as O’Toole demonstrates again and again, is that it doesn’t bear much contact with reality. The border on Ireland that Brexit makes inevitable, which clashes with the UK’s existing international obligations, is a puzzle with no solution. Any deal hammered out with the EU and any trade deals scraped from third countries shall inevitably fall short of the grandiose promises made in the referendum campaign, which, as we have seen (and as we know from the expression on the victor’s face on the morning of his triumph), Johnson did not expect – or want – to win.
IT’S no wonder Brexiteers rail against saboteurs and cry betrayal at every turn. The alternative is to face the music, and it is a dreadful cacophony of nothing: no trade deals, no action on the border, no leadership. As O’Toole notes, you cannot free yourself from imaginary oppression.
But there is also a deeper problem, which O’Toole clinically skewers. For all the talk about our precious, precious union, Brexit is a phenomenon that threatens to destroy the polity it seeks to liberate: the UK. It’s not just that Fermanagh is not as British as Finchley (if it ever was) because its residents may now claim Irish and therefore European citizenship. It is far more that the island of Great Britain is hopelessly divided unto itself, with Scotland and London strongly pro-Remain.
O’Toole is a pitiless and humourful analyst, and the book is packed with uncommon insights
Therefore, Brexit is essentially the project of a new polity, which O’Toole names England-without-London. This polity voted by a clear majority of almost 11% to leave the EU. But leaving will not satisfy it. “When you strip away the rhetoric, Brexit is an English nationalist movement,” says O’Toole, but it is a movement that dare not speak its name, whose goals have not been articulated, far less reached.
For O’Toole, the Brexit vote in June 2016 was about “the non-metropolitan English blowing the lid off” and giving voice to an identity separate from Britishness that has been on the rise for decades. How to marry this with their leaders’ red lines, which defended at all costs “the very thing the English were so deeply unhappy about – the union”?
Not the European Union. The precious, precious union. If the UK splinters, as it very well might, it may not be because Northern Ireland and Scotland exit stage left. Non-metropolitan England, which is busily finding itself, may dump these irksome extrusions, believes O’Toole.
Master of the smashing simile and the magnetic metaphor, O’Toole writes beautifully, and in that sense Three Years in Hell is a pleasure to read. Who can resist his depiction of Arlene Foster
“sweeping down the Stormont staircase […] like the star of a Busby Berkeley musical flanked by her all-male chorus line” to kick Theresa May into touch?
Brexit isn’t the only balloon O’Toole punctures. He is equally searing on the fantasies of Irish nationalists who see Brexit as a fast track to Irish unity. “To put it bluntly (as no one ever does) southerners have no interest in inheriting a political wreck, or becoming direct participants in a gory sequel, ‘Troubles III: The Orange Strikes Back’.”
HE is also unflinching on the EU, reminding Remainers that it isn’t simply a lovely, open, cross-cultural exchange: “Just look at what’s happening to Greece: the EU is slowly, sadistically and quite deliberately turning one of its own member states into a third-world country.”
O’Toole is a pitiless and humourful analyst, and Three Years in Hell is packed with uncommon insights. Its problem is explicit in the title. After three years in the bad place, who wants to go back? Now there is coronavirus too. Brexit looks like last year’s calamity.