The Times Magazine 51But isn’t it positive to see more mature
bodies in the sack? “Yes, maybe,” she says.
“I really miss seeing romantic films with
grown-ups. But a film with a woman my
age is about ‘finding herself’. It is about being
this age.” She gives a heavy sigh. “ ‘Oh, isn’t
she liberated for having fun at tango every
Tuesday night?’ That’s really sad. Why not a
really sexy, passionate love story with people
in their fifties or sixties?”
She looks far younger in the flesh than in
Borgen, where the camera unsparingly reveals
every wrinkle and fold. Knudsen says she’s
never learnt the skill acquired by Hollywood
stars to use the light to look younger. “I think
my muscles in my face are different when I’m
me. I think when I’m Birgitte, her worry and
her responsibility kind of dry her out in some
way. What is really great is that the age issue
is in there. So I don’t have to hide it.”
Birgitte is shown baffled by social media,
while the younger new PM cannily fuels
her popularity with selfies. Knudsen is averse
to invading her own privacy. “Although
I sometimes think, ‘Come on, I can’t be
a dinosaur. I have to deal with this age.’ ”
The stark generational divide between
complacent fiftysomethings and their
progressive children is one of Borgen’s new
themes, with Birgitte’s son joining vegan
activists at war with Denmark’s pig farmers.
“Why don’t you just do something,” she rails
at his pious girlfriend, “instead of playing the
victim game all the time?” Adam Price says this
comes from arguments he has at home with his
26-year-old vegan medical student daughter:
“All this demonstrating climate change by not
going to school, like Greta Thunberg? I say you
can’t only be activists by being absent from
things.” Knudsen agrees. “I definitely think it
is so much easier to tear down than to build.”
Alongside the old pressure of fame is
a new expectation to be a spokesperson for
every cause, but Knudsen is wary of a new
intolerance. “It’s like if you’re not with us,
you’re against us. So if you don’t approve of
this message, you disapprove of that message.
Which is not the case.” She thinks it ironic
that “on one hand we are trying to push off
all boundaries, and have much more colours
on the palette of sexuality and gender and
identity. But at the same time you’re not
allowed to change your mind, to be searching,
or not knowing. Judgment. Judgment.”
Given this explosive, opinionated, activist
age, there is more need than ever for political
drama. So is this series of Borgen a one-off?
Will we see a Prime Minister Nyborg
command the Statsministeriet again? Netflix
has deep pockets. “Never say never,” Adam
Price tells me. But Sidse Babett Knudsen
shakes her head. “No way. Birgitte is done.” nBorgen season four is on Netflix from June 2who suffer dire rates of poverty, alcoholism
and suicide, the chance of prosperity and true
independence. Yet this would collide with far
wealthier Denmark’s zero carbon targets.
Like other western nations, Denmark has
recently begun to confront its colonial past.
Yet Greenland is not a far-flung domain like
India or the Caribbean, but a close neighbour.
Recently, Mette Frederiksen apologised and
gave reparations to surviving victims of the
“Little Danes” experiment where, in 1951,
22 Inuit children were taken to Denmark
with the idea of educating a ruling Greenland
elite. Although supposed orphans, many had
families. Having forgotten their native tongue,
they returned for ever alienated from their
communities. Many died young.
I ask Price if Denmark’s sense of itself as a
liberal paragon is fading now that the country
is sending back Syrian refugees and has
expressed interest in Boris Johnson’s Rwandan
processing scheme. “Definitely,” he says. “And
we have been criticised internationally for
that, not least because our image was as this
very open, welcoming country. Then we woke
up to internal problems of integration. We just
have to admit that there are areas in Denmark
with ghetto-like communities, where there’s
too great a difference from the rest of the
Danish population.”
The Danish realm has been shrinking
since 1864, when Prussia and Austria took
Schleswig-Holstein. It once included huge
tracts of Sweden and all of Norway. “We come
from a culture of defeat,” says Price. “We’re
just the small, cosy country that tries to go
about our business without making too much
noise or we’ll be beaten by greater powers
around us.” The Arctic territories it controls
via Greenland make it prey not just to Russia
but China, which seeks to exploit new, shorter
shipping routes as ice fields melt.
Yet, says Price, for all this global angst the
pandemic proved Danes still have great faith
in their political system, with around 75 per
cent approval rating for the government’s
handling of the crisis. “We are sometimes sick
of our politicians, but we are still near the top
of the Transparency International index as
among the least corrupt nations on the planet.”
Denmark was the first EU country to drop
all Covid measures, on February 1, and Borgen
is set in a post-pandemic world. Knudsen was
at the end of one of her occasional six-month
breaks – “I’ve always done these travels
or pauses, to recalibrate, to think” – when
lockdown began. She spent the pandemic in
Copenhagen and was “very, very grateful for
being here. Because we were always allowed
to walk out. There was distance, but we’d meet
in the park on opposite benches.” The hardest
thing was keeping her mother at bay. “I had
to stop her coming up to us. ‘Stay over there!’
She thinks she’s invincible.”
Her schoolteacher mother and
photographer father raised Knudsen in
Copenhagen, apart from time in Tanzania
when her parents did voluntary work. At
18 she headed to Paris where, despite not
speaking the language, she blagged her way
into drama school. Returning to Denmark
she worked mainly in theatre and art house
films, including with director Lars von Trier.
But Scandinavian actors, like Claes Bang,
Alexander Skarsgard and Mads Mikkelsen,
know they must seek their fortune abroad.
Denmark only makes around 20 feature
films a year.
Borgen gave Knudsen an international
profile: she had a major role in Westworld,
played opposite Tom Hanks in A Hologram for
the King (in which she filmed a sex scene on
the day they met) and was a lesbian dominatrix
in Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy.
I ask if #MeToo made her reflect on things
she’d tolerated from men earlier in her career.
“No,” she says. “The people crossing my
boundaries have mostly been women.” Female
directors in Denmark, England and France
have, she says, exploited a faux-sisterly bond
to seduce her into “something that I’m not
comfortable with. Like, for example, only
women directors have asked me to take off
my clothes. Kind of insisted on it. I had to
do a swimming scene and said I want to be
covered. Then they gave me a small bikini.
And I said, ‘No, I said bathing suit.’ She [the
director] said, ‘Come on...’ A man would never
dare say, ‘Come on.’ ”
Did she refuse? “Yes. But it was very, very
difficult. And they get upset.” In another film
she was told she’d be shot in the bath. She
asked what she’d be wearing and the director,
believing she’d go naked when the moment
came, refused to tell her. So before the scene
she sat fully clothed in the bath. “I said, ‘What
are you going to do about that? Does it fit
your story?’ ”
When she watches other actors in nude
scenes, “I think that’s what that person is like
for real. And I say the actor’s name in my
head. I don’t say the role. A role goes with a
costume.” She recalls a sex scene in an old
series of Borgen, “and Mikael [Birkkjær], who
played my husband, said, ‘No one wants to see
these old bodies any more! Leave us alone!’ ”
She laughs, then tells me I must write, “To my
surprise, Sidse Babett Knudsen did this whole
interview in the nude.”‘IT’S GREAT THAT THE
AGE ISSUE IS IN THE
SHOW. SO I DON’T
HAVE TO HIDE IT’