Sofie’s choice

The Killing’s Sofie Grabol on her new £25 million drama, battling cancer, that jumper and dropping the F-bomb on Radio 2.

Sofie Grabol – the Danish actress much loved for her portrayal of Detective Inspector Sarah Lund (with jumper) in the Scandi-noir thriller, The Killing – is explaining why she has a conflicted relationship with her comfort zone. Sometimes she doesn’t want to venture from it. Meeting new people, for instance, is challenging: “Sociability is always connected to a little bit of uncomfortableness – and I was like that, even as a child. I love meeting people, one on one – but it is always very frightening for me to enter big
groups in a party or a club.”

When it comes to acting, however: “You also long to be out of your comfort zone – otherwise I wouldn’t be in this line of work because it is one long confrontation with embarrassment: being very intimate with people you don’t really know – which is the thrilling thing about this job.”

Last year was very much a no-comfort zone year for Grabol, after a tough 2013 – taking a break from acting for the first time in almost 30 years, as she recovered from breast cancer.

Ever since The Killing proved to be such a hit in the UK – drawing bigger audiences than Mad Men, and winning a Bafta – Grabol has wanted to work over here. When I first interviewed her in 2011, in Copenhagen, she seemed to think it unlikely that any roles would be forthcoming.

But, in 2014, not only did she have her English language debut at the Edinburgh Festival then the National Theatre, as Queen Margaret of Denmark, in the third of Rona Munro’s historic trilogy The James Pla – but she is also one of the central characters in a new 12-part TV drama,
Fortitude. It is reported to have cost Sky Atlantic £25 million, and has a cast of 30 or so including Michael Gambon, Stanley Tucci, Christopher Eccleston, Richard Dormer (Game of Thrones) and Jessica “Call the Midwife” Raine.

Grabol plays Hildur Odegard, the governor of a small mining town, Fortitude, in the Arctic Circle. The mines are closing and she is orchestrating the transition of the town into a high-end tourism destination, starting with her pet project – a glamorous ice hotel carved out of the glacier.

Its snowy setting and curious characters with dark histories mean the series
has already been compared to Twin Peaks and Fargo. It may lack the surreal humour of a David Lynch or Coen brothers project, but it certainly has its own share of macabre incidents, along with intriguing hints of something Other.

The exterior scenes were shot in Iceland and the interiors in Hayes, Middlesex. Grabol has form on being tight-lipped about the storyline of
her shows: “I’m in good training from The Killing. You can put me under torture and I’m not going to say anything.”

But she is prepared to talk about Michael Gambon, whom she watched, as a teenager, in The Singing Detective. “It was so big in Copenhagen and it made a HUGE impression on me. Actually, I think Michael Gambon’s
performance was maybe the first time that I thought, ‘This is acting.’”

It was an unusual filming experience to be in such a tiny, isolated place, for Fortitude, with only each other for company, but she loved it: “And every evening when we ate together, Michael Gambon [who plays a wildlife
photographer, with only a few weeks to live] was just the natural centre. It was like a tribe gathering around the fire – because the stories just spill
out of him.” Isn’t he grumpy? “No!” Grabol looks shocked at the suggestion. “He’s the opposite. He’s the most silly, sweet… he loves to make people laugh.”

In her long career in Denmark, Grabol has played every sort of character – in television, film and theatre, across the genres. She says that it is unusual, however, for her to play a powerful person – such as the governor: “When you play someone [Sarah Lund] who is in opposition to authority, it is different to when you play someone who has to defend the system.
“I consider my character in Fortitude to be the mother of this community and the thing about the mother is that she has two sides. How do you
know when it is in her interests or in the best interests of the people she is responsible for? It’s a new thing for me.”

The James Plays were a great success, with people camping overnight to get the last tickets at the National Theatre. When Grabol read Munro’s script for the first time, she was completely blown away by it.

I ask her if she can do a few lines for me, as the play is sold out. “You mean, you want me to do a little performance for you? Well, ‘You’ve got f* all except attitude.’”
Er… are you… do you mean… oh, I see, gosh, the language is very robust, then?
“Oh yes, very,” she says – which reminds her of an unfortunate incident involving herself, the BBC and Simon Mayo. She was in Edinburgh for The James Plays and was asked to do an interview with Mayo for his live Radio 2 show. Every night, she’s swearing her head off in front of 2,000 people, all laughing and enjoying the moment. So, not having been warned to watch her language, she doesn’t.

Mayo is on stage with Grabol and he asks her, of course, about her jumper in The Killing. “He was a very nice man, and I said something about that ‘f***g jumper’ and 100 people in the audience go ‘OHHHHHHHHHHHH!’, like that, and it was like a nightmare because I really didn’t know what they were screaming at.

“And then Simon Mayo said, ‘Oh, you can’t say that on radio!’ and I thought it was a joke, so I said, ‘I’m sorry, I meant bloody,’ which I honestly don’t even know is swearing! Apparently you’re not allowed to say that, either – but nobody had told me. So then everything became very awkward and there were 15 minutes left. Simon Mayo put some music on and he turned to me and said, ‘This is very serious. We have to apologise.’

“Then we’re back on the air and he apologises for the foul language. The audience could see that I was sweating and blushing – lucky it was radio – and somebody yelled out, ‘We love you! It’s OK!’ But it wasn’t OK.”
Why are you still so upset? “Because normally I’m a nice person and never want to offend anyone. This Simon Mayo, also, seemed very upset with me. Really, it was horrible. In the next music break I said, ‘I’m so sorry… it’s not
going to have consequences for you? You’re not going to be punished
somehow?’ And he said [very snippy voice], ‘You can expect it to be in the
press tomorrow!’ And it wasn’t.”

Grabol was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2012. The operation
t o remove t h e tumour was on 8 January 2013, and she came to London to do her first read-through on 7 January 2014. Sitting opposite her, in the library of a hotel in Covent Garden, she looks as gleamingly healthy as ever.
She is dressed all in black – drainpipe jeans, high-heeled boots, skinny black top. Her long hair is now a short elfin cut, and her face is still mesmerising, with those light-filled blue-green eyes, and her ready, slightly skew-whiff grin. Her manner is open, warm, teasing, and engaging. She can also be tough and direct.

When she was first diagnosed, people were always telling her about other women who had breast cancer: “I didn’t feel the need to look into that because we’re all different people. But I did feel the need to read about people in crisis in general.” The book she found most useful was Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking – a most clear-eyed dispatch from the widow left behind when her beloved husband, co-writer and mate of so many years [John Gregory Dunne] dies suddenly.
“Somebody gave me that book and it was the most brilliant description of going through a crisis and I related so much to it,” she says. “Even though my husband didn’t die… I don’t even have a husband.” (She’s divorced and has two children, son Bror, 13, and daughter Gudrun, ten.)
“To me, it was about going through that underworld, which she describes so well, without any sentimentality. That’s what I liked and identified with. I was like an explorer heading out to an unknown country to gather samples of strange species and then look at them.
“Obviously there were moments when I just lost it – but even in those moments, I was trying to understand what I was going through. I’m the
same in my work. I see the structure of the character like maths.”
Do you feel that you have changed? “It’s a hard one to answer but to give it an image, I would say that I’m the same house but I know more rooms of the house.”

We move on. I tell her I can quite see The Killing: the Musical and
she claps her hands in glee. “When it came out, we were always being asked [concerned face], ‘Wasn’t it hard to be in a very serious story for years?’ and
we were, like, ‘We’ve been having a ball!’ I remember there was an on-going joke of making the musical version of the interrogations: ‘Are
you the killer?’” she breaks into operatic mode. “So we already saw The Killing: the Musical back then… but, Ginny, I don’t think you should
put your money in that project!”

I had told her that she had some competition now with DSI Stella Gibbons (aka Gillian Anderson) in The Fall, and her silk top (aka The Blouse), she said: “But how can The Blouse be a rival to The Jumper… Oh you mean, it’s going to be a cult. I will happily light the fire of the Olympic Torch and pass it on.” But then she tells me about a 20-year-old niece who texted her from Copenhagen saying she was going to a Halloween party and wanted to borrow her aunt’s jumper, and a wig [from when Grabol was having chemotherapy]. Sorry, are you saying that your niece was going to a Halloween party dressed as Sarah Lund? “Yes – and I texted her saying, ‘You can’t borrow the wig – that’s too weird for me – but you can borrow The Jumper.’ And then I found myself saying, ‘But you know, nothing can happen to it. I don’t want red wine or fake blood or vomit all over it.’ So I can laugh at myself but The Jumper still holds a special place.”

Radio Times