Danish actor Sofie Gråbøl became famous internationally playing police officer Sarah Lund in TV thriller The Killing. She also starred in the Arctic-set Sky series Fortitude. She made her film debut in 1986, her early films including 1988 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Pelle the Conqueror. She now appears as one of the victims of a serial killer played by Matt Dillon in The House That Jack Built, the latest film from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, whom she previously worked with on his 2006 comedy, The Boss of It All. She lives in Copenhagen with her two children.
So, The House That Jack Built…
What did you think?
It’s very disturbing. What did you think when you saw it?
I’ve seen it three times now, and every time I’ve wanted to see it again. Honestly, you find it disturbing? I find it extremely inspiring and funny and really hard to categorise. I don’t think I’ve ever been part of a film that has so much on its mind. Lars von Trier has so much that he wants to tell us. In Denmark he’s the only director who tells stories on that scale – he tells stories of biblical proportions about good and evil, death and life, these really grand themes and questions.
Was your section in the film traumatic to shoot?
I have to disappoint you. It obviously wasn’t pleasant, but the environment Lars created was so loving and safe and calm that we were able to shoot these quite disturbing scenes. The funny thing from an actor’s perspective is that you have this strangely masochistic or sadistic relationship with your work – you want your character to suffer, that’s what you really want to play, isn’t it? And you normally have to do classical theatre to play these huge dramatic tones. But you get to play them with Lars von Trier.
Your sequence might alarm fans of Sarah Lund, who are used to seeing you being tough.
Lars is the master of female portraits. It’s very rare that he chooses to tell a story from a masculine perspective, and this is a very merciless portrait of a man. You can’t accuse him of having a stereotyped view of women – he’s portrayed women in interesting, nuanced ways. Here he takes a very harsh male perspective – he chooses to have this very distant, one-dimensional view on the female characters. I didn’t even have a name in the script, I was “Lady 3”, and that was very much on purpose.
What was working with Matt Dillon like? He’s unrecognisably scary as Jack.
He was extremely sweet and easygoing. When I was young, he was like the Marlon Brando of our generation, he was someone I had a huge crush on. So I was very star-struck, but that lasted for an instant because he was so nice to be with.
What’s Von Trier like on set? The general perception of him is that he’s super-intense and depressive.
He’s a very caring person, which might surprise people. He’s not like his films at all – he has an absolutely brilliant, very dark sense of humour. He’s very open and very direct – maybe that’s the most Danish part of him, because he’s not very Danish in his art. You can tell by looking at him and listening to him that it has a great price for him to be the artist that he is – you can believe that he’s very familiar with the hell that he reports from.
He comes to the set extremely prepared, but when he’s going to shoot, he puts himself and everyone else in a situation where you’re not protected by all your preparation. He has a motto when he works. In Danish, it’s husk at sjusk: husk means remember, sjusk means to be sloppy – so it means “remember to make mistakes”. With any other director, it’s a virtue to come well prepared, but with Lars it’s almost a sin.
You have two children, now in their teens. When you were in The Killing, was it strange for them to see how famous you’d become?
I always kept my children very far away from my work life – not any more, because now they can put everything in perspective. But during The Killing, they knew I was an actor but that was about it. When my daughter was nine or 10, she had a friend whose father is a singer – I was walking with her in a mall, and there was a poster of her friend’s father, who was doing a concert. She saw it, paused, and said: “I wonder what it’s like to have a famous parent like that?” I felt: mission accomplished!
You recently made a comedy with director Paprika Steen, That Time of Year, about a family having a terrible Christmas. Is that a very Danish thing – to be ironic about Christmas?
I think you are maybe the masters of irony, aren’t you, in Great Britain? We do like irony, we like punctuating the melodrama. We’ve thrown a lot of our traditions away and pretty much the only thing we have is Christmas. You know the Danish word hygge? In Denmark, Christmas Eve is the concentration of hygge – that evening, we have to fulfil all our dreams of the happy family having hygge together. So that film is about how badly it can go.
Earlier this year you shot a BBC TV series – period drama Gentleman Jack, created by Sally Wainwright, of Happy Valley fame.
Ah, but you know what? I’m in it for one scene, that’s it. It’s an extremely small part, but a very significant scene. I read the script and it was so well written. I’m sorry to say I haven’t seen any of her work, but you always recognise a really good writer. I thought she was a fabulous woman to talk to, extremely down to earth and intelligent and funny. And Suranne Jones! My God, I was completely thrown – she’s just so radiant, I was completely mesmerised by her.
In it, you play Queen Marie of Denmark. You’ve also played Queen Margaret of Denmark on stage in the UK (in The James Plays)…
Maybe that’s my niche. Do you have any more Danish queens for me? Because I only get to play them abroad.
The House That Jack Built is released on 14 December
