Ólafur Darri Ólafsson is 6ft 5in, has a beard like a pine forest and the gait of a grizzly bear. He’s Iceland’s biggest star – and most unlikely sex symbol. The 42-year-old actor is currently playing the stoic police chief Andri in Trapped, Iceland’s most expensive TV show ever, which is raging like a blizzard in BBC4’s primetime Saturday night slot.
“He looks like one of the looming mountains in the fjord,” says the show’s creator, Baltasar Kormákur. “I didn’t want to go with a typical leading man, although I got pressure to. Ólafur Darri was always my first choice. He has become something of a Gérard Depardieu figure in Iceland. Women here swoon over him, believe it or not.”
As Trapped starts, a torso floating in a fjord turns an isolated town into a crime scene. Everyone is fearful, everyone suddenly suspect. Then the weather descends; an awesome snowstorm that grounds the airplanes, ices the roads and leaves the villagers confined to their homes. We’ve been here before, it seems, in Scandi and Nordic dramas such as The Killing or The Bridge, or the Arctic-based British series Fortitude. But Trapped is very much its own beast.
It was shot over six months in Seyðisfjörður, a tiny coastal fishing village with a population of just 1,000. When the snow falls here, it lasts for months. “It’s a mix of Nordic noir and Agatha Christie,” says Kormákur. “I wanted to close people in with a murder, to make the town a ticking clock. And I wanted to remind the audience that we are on the outskirts of the inhabitable world. The weather is one of the ruling factors in Iceland – so I made it a pivotal character.”
Ólafsson’s performance is as remarkable as the landscape. At first, Andri does not have much crime to worry about, although he has his concerns: his wife, who has left him, is about to visit the town with her new man (and he’s still wearing his wedding band). His daughters are prone to bullying, and his father-in-law is still mourning the death of his other daughter in a fire. Then, as Andri examines the headless corpse found in the fjord, he leans in to study the knife marks minutely before smelling them. He’s been here before.
Speaking from Budapest, where he’s filming the new NBC series Emerald City, Ólafsson explains how he developed the character: “Andri is in a strange place in his life,” he says. “He’s obviously over-qualified as a policeman for this small town and he seems out of place. But when the murder happens, you see he is turned on by it. Something seems to be woken inside of him.”
Rarely has a lead in a TV show said so little. The quiet detective with an unknown past is a trope as old as Hollywood, but Andri’s past is expertly drip-fed to the audience. “I don’t know whether it’s a Nordic thing, but men in Iceland are very locked-up, very quiet,” says Ólafsson. “They hardly ever express emotion.” He admits that his father was his inspiration for Andri. “I’ve never seen him cry, and he rarely gives anything away – but he can use silence very effectively,” he says. “I haven’t told him yet; I’ll tell him once the show has finished in Iceland. I’m sure he’ll be proud.”
Ólafsson was born in the US state of Connecticut but moved to Iceland at the age of four. His talents have taken him far beyond his homeland. His voice can be heard in Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming adaption of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, and he has roles alongside Ben Stiller in Zoolander 2 and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (in which he sings). In the first series of HBO’s True Detective, he memorably told Matthew McConaughey: “There’s a shadow on you, son.”
Ólafsson describes Icelandic culture as “capable of dealing with anything.” This sense of resilience, he explains, was sorely needed after the 2008 financial crash. “It had a huge impact on our very small society,” he says. “These brilliant minds had borrowed a ton of money that evaporated in a moment. It was touch-and-go for Iceland as a nation, and a lot of us are scared it will happen again. We were only saved, really, by people from around the world coming to bail us out.”
This intense fear of isolation and vulnerability is the driving force for Trapped. “I’m still blown away by how desolate Iceland can be, how deserted it is,” says Ólafsson. “It’s very often like living on the moon.”
Trapped continues on BBC4 from 9pm on 27 February. Nordic Noir & Beyond will release the series on DVD on 11 April.
Trapped premieres in Australia on 16 June on SBS On Demand
