The Times Magazine 49ewind a decade, before Brexit,
Trump, Covid and Ukraine; before
social media turned politics into a
global screaming match. In 2012,
the box-set middle classes were
engrossed in Borgen, besotted
with the fictional Danish prime
minister, Birgitte Nyborg.
Glamorous yet vulnerable,
principled but cunning, she was
liberal democracy’s thrilling new torchbearer.
We watched her struggle to reconcile power
with family life, admired cool Danish interiors,
learnt about coalition government ( just as
we’d elected one of our own) and how to
pronounce hygge.
When we left Birgitte almost nine years
ago, she was divorced and politically battle-
scarred, yet the party she founded – the
thrillingly named New Democrats – was
back in coalition, and she was heading to the
Statsministeriet as foreign secretary. After
that, Sidse Babett Knudsen, who played her
for three series, was emphatic: bye, Birgitte.
Yet, lavished with Netflix cash, Borgen is
back. So is Hillary Clinton’s favourite show,
which portrays politicians not as idiots (The
Thick of It) or monsters (House of Cards) but
flawed idealists, still relevant in our angry,
polarised age? Borgen’s creators have a record
of spooky prescience: Helle Thorning-Schmidt
became the first female Danish prime minister
a year after the first episode. And this series
has Denmark in conflict with Russia after oil
is found in Greenland. As for Birgitte herself,
she’s unhappily working for a younger female
PM (Thorning-Schmidt coached the actress
who played her on how to command a room),
who looks uncannily like Denmark’s 44-year-
old PM, Mette Frederiksen.
I meet Knudsen in Copenhagen, where
I interviewed her a decade ago. Back then
she had wild hair, a leather biker jacket,
chunky boots, and was perpetually dying
for a fag. Now 53, with a series of Hollywood
movies behind her, she’s sleeker in a floor-
length yellow wool coat and mechanically
chewing Extra gum, as she’s trying to quit
even Nicorette.
“I’ve never had performance anxiety
before,” she says of her return. “But this part
had become a kind of myth around me. No
matter what I’ve done since, journalists in
every country asked, ‘So is there going to
be another series?’ My initial response
was, ‘Don’t touch it.’ I’ve always felt very
responsible for Birgitte, and the whole
DNA of Borgen.”
Everything was new: the set, production
company, most of the cast (including the actor
playing her son). “But the first day of shooting
was so great,” says Knudsen. “All at once I
knew Birgitte’s thoughts, how she would react.
I was almost laughing. It was a joyful thing.”Knudsen leaves the politics in Borgen to
its award-winning creator, Adam Price, a self-
confessed policy junkie. But she’s always had
input into Birgitte’s personal side, once arguing,
in vain, against a clumsy plotline in which the
drunken PM slept with her government driver.
This time she wanted to ensure a truthful
depiction of a fiftysomething Birgitte.
It felt odd, she says, often to be the oldest
person on the set. “I definitely find myself
sometimes looking for the adult in the room
and then realising, I’m the adult now.” On the
plus side, she cares less about others’ approval:
“No one’s around to give you a medal. You’re
the one giving out the medals now, so you
might as well award one to yourself.”
We find Birgitte alone: her husband has
remarried, her daughter lives in New York,
her student son is just an occasional lodger.
Liberated from caring for others, she no longerseeks a work-life balance. She just works. This
is a fantasy of many working mothers, says
Knudsen. “She thinks, ‘Great, I don’t have to
cook...’ I don’t know a professional woman
who doesn’t secretly wish for no distractions.
You assume your work will be better, which is
not always the case.”
Knudsen never talks of her own
relationships: she’s unmarried (never takes
a date to premieres) and has a son, Louis,
aged 18. “When I gave an interview early
on, I told a journalist I didn’t want to talk
about my private life. He said, ‘Well, we make
you. So if you don’t give us something, we’re
not going to give you a career.’ And I just
thought it made no sense that to do my job,
I should give you my kidney? Or my firstborn
child? Or my secret? No way. That’s not the
deal. If I’m not good at what I do, I wouldn’t
get jobs. That’s the deal.”
She was keen, however, to put her own
experiences of menopause into Borgen.
Birgitte, who has had breast cancer, is told
by her doctor she can’t take hormones, so is
constantly using a hairdryer on the armpits
of her shirts after hot flushes. I say that at
53, she would surely be over the worst. “I don’t
know,” says Knudsen. “I’m still on hormones.
I wouldn’t let them go. I think it’s right. I do
have a friend that was in the same situation as
Birgitte. But for me, it’s really been a miracle.”
She hadn’t intended to take HRT;
considered it akin to the debate on pain
relief in childbirth, “where you either do it
the natural way or they put medicine in you,
and you cheat yourself and you’re not a real
woman”. But in her late forties, visiting France,
where she lived for six years, Knudsen confided
in a friend that menopause was disturbing
her sleep. The friend took her to French
pharmacies where many drugs don’t require
a prescription and rubbed her with her own
oestrogen gel. “I said, ‘Stop it, I’m natural.’ ”
But back in Denmark, she saw her doctor.
It was important to Knudsen that Birgitte’s
menopause was “a theme, not a plot point”,
ie something she endured but didn’t prevent
her doing her job. “We had discussions about
the emotional side. I’ve had hot flushes in
meetings. It’s embarrassing. Birgitte also gets
angrier than she would if her hormones
weren’t pushing her as well. So there’s a little
loss of control.”
Menopause is part of a wider theme of
whether humans can, or should, control
nature, says Adam Price. Greenland, with just
56,000 people, is independent of Denmark
apart from in foreign policy, defence and if
valuable natural resources are found. Then the
split of revenue must be negotiated between
the two states. Uranium finds were a major
Greenland election issue, with the country
eventually voting for a mining ban. A major oil
discovery would give its indigenous people,R
With Borgen creator Adam Price (left) and director
Soren Kragh-Jacobsen at the Baftas, 2012‘INITIALLY MY
RESPONSE TO DOING
BORGEN AGAIN WAS,
“DON’T TOUCH IT” ’
PREVIOUS SPREAD: NETFLIX. THIS PAGE: GETTY IMAGES, MIKE KOLLÖFFELOn the set of the latest Borgen with Johanne Louise Schmidt