Danish actress Trine Dyrholm (Beginnings, The Girl With the Needle, The Celebration, Poison) has made a reputation for herself as someone who always gives her all and brings multiple layers to her portrayals.
To Series Mania in Lille, France, which kicks off on Friday, she is bringing her new series The Danish Woman, which is getting its world premiere in the festival’s International Panorama section on Sunday.
Dyrholm stars as Ditte Jensen, who retires from the Danish Secret Service to live a quiet life in Reykjavik, Iceland. But she can’t stop being the elite soldier and warrior she was trained to be. In her new surroundings, she therefore decides to help her neighbors.
International sales for the six-episode series from director Benedikt Erlingsson (Woman at War, Of Horses and Men) are being handled by The Party Film Sales.
Dyrholm tells THR that she is “so grateful that I get to take on these great challenges” in her various projects. “And this one is a huge challenge,” she emphasizes about The Danish Woman. “It’s a big lead in a TV show from Benedikt Erlingsson whose work I love. He’s a great, great filmmaker. So I’m just very excited about it.”
What did work on the series entail? “I spent three and a half months in Iceland last year which was amazing,” the star shares. “I love Iceland. The Icelanders just live with nature, and that is really in their mentality, and I felt related to that.”
She also enjoyed that her character is not one-dimensional. “She is a lot of things,” Dyrholm explains. “She’s used to being a former secret service agent, and so she starts helping her neighbors, whether they want it or not. It’s amazing. It’s a very complex piece.”
Reading the script reminded her of reading the script for her recent movie Poison from director Désirée Nosbusch (Bad Banks), in which she played opposite Tim Roth. “These are things that when you read them, you immediately feel that you want to do them,” she tells THR. “With The Danish Woman, I’ve never read anything like that, so for me, it was like, ‘I have to do this. This is crazy!’ And I also like doing things that I’m not really sure I can actually do.”
That sounds surprising for an actress who always seems to find ways to make her characters so interesting and multilayered.
“My approach to acting is that I borrow the eyes of the character and look at the world from their perspective,” Dyrholm explains. “So, I put my ego aside and just try to experience and explore the moment with the character. Of course, you do all your research, you do all your talks with the director, the writer and the other actors. And you have rehearsals. But you actually find out things while doing them instead of already knowing them.”
That also means being open to the people she portrays and their decisions and values. “I never judge a character. I’m always wondering: what would she feel here. I’m wondering with the character because we don’t know anything,” the star says. “We don’t know anything until it happens. It is like exploring the moment. So I always try to trick myself, even though I know the lines, I know the situation, I know the arrangement. When somebody says ‘action,’ I try to be [open]. I don’t know what happens, and then explore it with the character.”
This has become “a natural method for me,” which is giving the actress room to be open for unexpected things. “If you go into a scene and you know, okay, now she’s angry, then you have all these questions like: how is she angry?” she explains. “And then maybe suddenly she is embarrassed that she’s so angry. There are all these vibrations happening in everybody all the time. That is life.”
Dyrholm doesn’t only try to encounter her characters with openness but also people in her everyday life. “It’s also my approach in real life,” she tells THR. “I try to meet people instead of thinking, ‘I know who you are.’ Because we cannot judge people. And we cannot judge characters.”
Adds the actress: “It is especially important now to be open to different perspectives. I’m getting so depressed about the state of the world at the moment. And I feel that we need art more than ever. We need space for reflection more than ever. We need a space where we can share the burden of life, the burden of desperation, fear – all these things that we’re dealing with, the existential themes that we can’t really put into words. That’s our job as actors and filmmakers to make this room for people and then invite the audience into the inner chaos of the character.”
Concludes Dyrholm: “Everybody, whatever religion, whatever gender, whatever culture, has something that we can relate to, and I always try to find that in my characters.”
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