The cast of Young Wallander: 'We try not to think of it as a tragedy – more as a puzzle'
As endings go, Kurt Wallander’s was pretty concrete. The final sentences of Henning Mankell’s last book about the Swedish police officer, The Troubled Man, are some of the most bleakly abrupt ever put to print. “Kurt Wallander slowly descended into a darkness that some years later transported him into the empty universe known as Alzheimer’s disease,” they read. “After that there is nothing more. The story of Kurt Wallander is finished, once and for all.”
But just because we know how things end, it doesn’t mean we know how they began. And that’s where Young Wallander comes in. The new Netflix series revives Wallander as a young and naive twentysomething beat cop, before the decades of neglect and poor life choices. However, Young Wallander is also set in the present day. So what is it, exactly? A prequel? A reimagining? A reboot?
“Oh gosh, what is it? I don’t know. What do you think?” asks the show’s producer, Berna Levin. I tell her that she probably should know, given that her company, Yellow Bird UK, was responsible for creating it.
She tries again. “It’s a prequel that’s also a reimagining, I’d say. If you follow the line we’re drawing, you’ll end up with Wallander as he was with Henning. We’re not going to take him anywhere where you wouldn’t end up with Wallander as we know him.”
Whatever it is, Young Wallander is much, much better than you might expect. Yes, Wallander is now an absurdly photogenic young man in a leather jacket and, yes, the cold open to the entire series involves a man’s head being exploded by a grenade. But unlike, for example, the Perry Mason reboot – which wedged an upsettingly gratuitous close-up of a dead baby into its opening scene – the violence here feels like part of the comfortable old Wallander fabric. His was always a story about a man drowning in the emotional extremes of his job; it’s just that here we are watching the first extreme he ever encounters.
This feeling of respectful continuation is largely thanks to Henning Mankell himself. It was Mankell who initially brought together Yellow Bird and Danish producer Ole Søndberg; and prior to his death in 2015, he had been an early supporter of the Young Wallander idea. “He really wanted to do it,” says Levin. “When he passed away, we dropped everything out of respect. And then, when I came to London to start Yellow Bird UK, it was just sort of wishful thinking. Wallander basically set up Yellow Bird Scandinavia, so wouldn’t it be amazing if Yellow Bird UK’s first show could be Wallander as well? We spoke with the estate and, because he himself had wanted to do it, they were OK with it.”
One weird quirk of the series is that, while it’s a Swedish story about a Swedish character created by a Swedish author told in Sweden, Young Wallander only has one Swedish actor. That is Wallander himself, Adam Pålsson, who found himself surrounded by British talent on-set. “In the beginning, I just felt awful,” Pålsson recalls. “Language-wise, I was worried about being able to express myself accurately. But then, after a while, I just started to think, ‘Hey, they chose me. It’s their problem, not mine.’ I had to think that way to stay focused and confident.”
Wallander will likely make Pålsson an international star. Onscreen, he manages to replicate the wounded Wallander gaze with ease and, in person, he’s charming and self-deprecating. “I’ve spent every single holiday in my whole life in Wallander land,” he says of his connection to the character. “South of Sweden, where the novels take place. My whole family’s from there. My grandma, she has a house in the same small village where Wallander’s dad lives. So I’ve always had that in me. My dad’s name is Kurt. It feels like my childhood was surrounded by Wallander in a way.”
I ask Pålsson about the international appeal of Wallander. His reply is that the British and Swedish have a similar sensibility. “It’s a kind of melancholy, especially compared to the American culture, which is not necessarily bad, but more superficial. Everyone is just smiling with their brand new teeth, and the first time you meet them they’re like: ‘Come over to my place and we’ll have lunch’. When they say that to me, I call them the day after, like: ‘Hey so I’m standing outside your house. Are we having that lunch?’”
Pålsson is arguably best known here for his role in Armando Iannucci’s space sitcom Avenue 5, where he played gormless but good-looking crew-member Mads. Incredibly, despite achieving a considerable level of fame in Sweden, he initially took a role as an extra. “I don’t think my character even had a name. But I went for the part – small, small, small part – because I just wanted to do it. So I paid for the flight tickets and the hotel room myself. I just wanted to do something else, and I really admire Iannucci. And I think they understood quite quickly that this guy’s not an extra, you know? So they gave me a name. That was nice.”
My sense is that, once people have seen Pålsson as Wallander, they’ll want to track back and explore his Swedish work. I ask him where he thinks they should start. “There’s a series that was actually broadcast on the BBC, I think”, he replies. “It’s called Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves. And there is a series called Before We Die. Ricky Gervais called it his favourite series.” I tell him that it was shown here on Walter Presents, a section of the Channel 4 website dedicated to foreign language drama. “And the 500 people who watch it love it, right?” Pålsson deadpans back.
So Young Wallander is a beginning. But it’s a beginning to a story that doesn’t end well. Like it or not, since we know what’s coming, Young Wallander will always be laced with a small amount of Scandi tragedy. Ellise Chappell, for example, plays a woman named Mona. Except, wait, wasn’t Wallander married to a woman named Mona? And didn’t they get divorced? And, hang on, didn’t the agony of their separation cause them both to spiral into alcoholism?
Chappell, who played Morwenna in Poldark, won’t be drawn on the inevitability of the prequel. “Mona is quite different in this show than she is in the books,” she says. “I mean, for one, in the books, she’s a hairdresser. And in the show, she’s working for an organisation that aims to support refugees and asylum seekers. So in that sense, I felt, I guess, a bit more freedom from expectation.”
Levin is also keen to make the case that Young Wallander won’t be a total bummer. “We try not to think of it as a tragedy, but more of a puzzle that needs to be put together. I mean, we know where he goes. It is sad and it is dark. Every time he picks up a drink, it’s sort of like, ‘No, that’s not going to end well. You don’t want to do that.’ But how Wallander met Mona is one of the things that there’s very little written about, and the fun of it is now we can imagine how that happened. So all of those things are for the existing audience. For the newer audiences who don’t know Wallander well, it’s just fun.”
And it is. If nothing else it’s refreshing to see a version of Wallander who hasn’t had the stuffing kicked out of him yet. “It’s very much a transition,” says Pålsson. “Where this young, naive, blue-eyed, warm hearted, compassionate, empathetic young man finds himself confronted with the real world.”
Levin says: “Even as a young person, Wallander is someone who cares deeply. It’s what makes him great, but it’s his weakness as well. He cares deeply about people. He cares deeply about injustice. He’s a decent person. But this is a time where we see him get bitten by the bug, and this is what he’s going to do. For better or for worse.”
Young Wallander airs on Netflix from 3 September