Pilou Asbaek

What’s with these Danes? They’re so tortured and gloomy on the screen and so very warm and friendly off it; it’s like the depressive comedian syndrome in reverse. Pilou Asbaek, who plays the Prime Minister’s spin doctor, Kasper Juul, in Borgen (horrendous childhood) and the ship’s cook, Mikkel, in A Hijacking (who slowly loses his mind) is almost ridiculously lighthearted and fun in the flesh.

The disjunct seems more striking, perhaps, because the only Danish drama and films that we get to see in this country are noir and sombre. Do the Danes ever do comedy? “Yeah, we do, “Asbaek says. “But I don’t tend to be in them. It has become a joke in Denmark that whenever you need a guy who has been molested as a child or who gets killed or shot or wounded, you call Pilou – and it’s just, like, ‘Ah, fuck!’”

That said, he is delighted to say that he’s just done a comedy film called Sex, Drugs and Taxation, “it’s about this guy in the sixties and seventies who had a travel agency and he just did drugs and sex and his best friend did the taxation. I play the travelling guy and I am very funny and very naked and I’m having sex with so many women. It was a tough job.”

From the moment I walk into the room, it is obvious the actor is a joker. His T-shirt has slogans, “Yeah, the fun things in life,” he exclaims, as I read out “Ammunition – Fishing Tackle – Guns – Beer – Wine – Cars.” What is he, Denmark’s answer to Jeremy Clarkson? “Oh, yes, and on the back, I wish it would say Women, but it doesn’t.”

We talk about Piv Bernth who produced The Killing and is now head of drama at the Danish public broadcaster, DV: “These ladies, man, they’re tough,” he says. “There are some strong ladies in that department.” Denmark has its own strong lady as Prime Minister: Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Asbaek points out the amusing fact that Borgen had a female Prime Minister, Birgitte Nyborg (played by Sidse Babett Knudsen), a year before the real one was elected – life imitating television.

He was chuffed to have been interviewed by Alastair Campbell when he came on the set, particularly when he googled him: “And I was, like, ‘Oh my God! He’s Tony Blair’s spin doctor – he is Kasper!’

“He is a big, big fan of Kasper and he asked me how it was to play him. And he loved the fact that I defended him because Kasper Juul isn’t the dark lord of spin. He’s not a cynical bastard – he’s a guy who is good at his job and a good spin doctor, he sells his politician as good as he can. Sometimes to sell a politician is not to tell a bad story about them but just to go to the line where you’re not lying but you’re not denying anything.”

I congratulate him on a completely harrowing performance in his new film, A Hijacking – written and directed by Tobias Lindholm about a Danish freight ship’s crew who are taken hostage in the Indian Ocean by Somali pirates. He is the ship’s cook, Mikkel, who is pushed forward to state the hostages’ case to the CEO of the shipping company, played by Soren Malling (The Killing, Borgen). 

MV Rosen, the ship in the film, had actually been hijacked in 2007 for a hundred days, and some of the extras on the film had been crew members at that time. The negotiator for the company is Gary Sjoldmose Porter who is also a real hostage crisis negotiatior. The pirates are played by Somali refugees the casting director in Kenya discovered on the streets. Lindholm based his script on tapes of negotiations between pirates and CEOs of companies – “This is the reason why the film has been shown in NATO and in Brussels and Washington for political leaders. All the things you see in the film have happened in real life.”

I’m assuming he gave some thought to how he would cope in a hostage situation: “I would have broken down much earlier than Mikkel did. I’m very sensitive and I’m not a fighter. I’m one of those guys that if you hit me, I would say ‘Are you finished?’ I’m a pacifist.”

His girlfriend, Anna*ck, is a playwright and the couple had a daughter, Agnes, three months ago. She is writing a monologue for him to perform on the stage next year: “It will be so cool. It’s funny because she is, seriously, the funniest girl and we want to do a funny feminist manifest. I want to be a girl. The whole setting is pink and I have a pink jumper and I just want to go on stage and say, ‘I am a woman and now this is what we women will talk about.’ Because everybody is talking about strong female characters – it’s like a mania and we’re so sick of it. I am. As a guy, as a dude, I’m like ‘Guys, seriously, what about us, man? All these strong women, strong women, strong women everywhere.’ And so I said to Anna, ‘Write the strongest feminist monologue you can write – and let a guy say it.’

Can I ask you something I suspect you’ve been asked before? “Would I ever do porn?” Well, no, actually! It was to ask you about the same actors appearing in all the shows. “Yeah, I know! It is a very small country – and right now it’s very much the same actors, but they are not necessarily the best ones. Seriously.”

It’s time for him to go on to a Q and A session. I ask him, finally, about ‘hygge’ [pronounced hoo-guh] the Danish word which doesn’t have a direct English translation. How could he best explain it? “Hygge is like if you turned off your recorders and we went down and had a pint and were just two people chatting and I said, ‘What is it with Helen Mirren? She’s fucking awesome, man!’ Just having a good time – that’s hygge.”

Radio Times