Sarah Lund is not a Superwoman
Sofie Gråbøl on her alter ego, The Killing’s detective inspector Sarah Lund and her stupid jumper
WORDS BY OMER ALI | PORTRAITS BY PAUL STUART
THE SUN SHINES DOWN ON AN OPEN-AIR RESTAURANT IN COPENHAGEN. Sitting opposite me, Sofie Gråbøl is animated and smiley. The scene could not be further from the grim image of the city – and Gråbøl – presented in the hit Danish TV series The Killing, which aired on BBC TV in the UK earlier this year.
Over an extraordinary 20-episode run, The Killing followed the fictional investigation into the death of a Copenhagen schoolgirl. Fans still conjure with the names of the characters: victim Nanna Birk Larsen, her parents Pernille and Theis, politician Troels Hartmann, whose election campaign is somehow tied up with the murder and, of course, detective inspector Sarah Lund, the role played by Gråbøl.
Lund is single-minded, socially repressed and the subject of a cult following – not least for the black and white Faroese sweater she wears in almost every episode. The series first aired in Denmark in 2007, before travelling across Europe and finally landing in Britain, where several million viewers made sure to be home on Saturday nights for each new development.
Gråbøl had been used to press calls as the show gained currency in Austria and Germany (‘It’s lovely – like your baby travelling out in the world. Sometimes you get a postcard – I’m doing fine here – and it makes you happy, but it’s not something I pay too much attention to’), though the level of success in England was a total surprise.
‘I’d heard the show was going to start airing there but I didn’t focus on it,’ Gråbøl says. ‘Then I started getting these phone-calls from the BBC and other places: “You have to come over here and do press.” I didn’t have the time but they were very insistent and, at some point, a woman on the phone said, “I don’t think you realise how big a success it is.”
It’s then it started dawning on me.
‘[The programme] has been shown in many countries with great success but nowhere has it been received like in England. I don’t know what nerve it hit there. And now I guess I’m at least five years older than people in England see me!’ ‘You look the same,’ I assure her. ‘No,’ she giggles. ‘But thank you.’
In Britain The Killing (Forbrydelsen in Danish – literally ‘the crime’) inspired blogs and Twitter speculation about the murderer’s identity. ‘I read those blogs sometimes, sat in my kitchen, smiling. They were amazing to read, heartwarming, really, like a big, warm embrace.’
When the series originally aired in Denmark, shooting was still continuing and, like the viewers, the cast didn’t know the killer’s identity either. ‘We weren’t told who the killer was and we only got the script one episode at a time, so I was guessing as much as everyone else. I had a lot of interesting discussions with people in the streets.’
Then there was the jumper. ‘They were obsessed with the jumper, like you are in England. I can’t believe it. It’s strange.’ Gråbøl found it in a pile of clothes at a costume fitting – ‘I fought for that sweater,’ she says. There was a practical consideration to her choice: ‘We wanted a woman who was so married to her work, she didn’t really care about anything else. We didn’t want her to change clothes all the time, which you normally do for every scene.’
The jumper said almost as much about the character of Lund as Gråbøl’s acting. ‘In a sense, I can understand why people are so obsessed with that stupid jumper. This woman is in a line of work where she deals with the worst brutality of humanity, and she is tough and cynical. But to me that jumper is very soft and very 70s – from a time when there was a belief in human values and togetherness. It tells me that deep down this is a soft person even though she’s tough. It also shows a woman who’s so sure of herself she doesn’t have to dress to get respect. She’s a woman who doesn’t use her femininity, her sexuality, who’s hiding it somehow. So the jumper says a lot of things.’
In reality, Gråbøl couldn’t be more different from her character Lund. She’s great fun to talk to, and I don’t think I’ve ever been asked as much about myself by an interviewee, which is slightly unnerving – as are the giant sunglasses she wears for most of our lunch. She acts as her own agent and fixed up our interview herself, which is pretty unusual. She has two children whose care she seems very relaxed about sharing with her ex-husband.
Gråbøl cycled to our meeting and says she feels part of the family in Copenhagen – she grew up here and can’t imagine living anywhere else, though she says she would love to work in Britain. She fell into acting by chance, answering an ad in a paper aged 17 (she’s now 43): ‘I had finished school, tenth grade, and I didn’t know what to do. I had no ambitions in any direction and never, ever thought I would become an actor. I was actually very shy. I still am: I can’t give speeches and I can’t be on a stage as myself.
‘I had a small job checking mini-bars in a hotel in Copenhagen – I slept until noon and was quite happy but a bit bored, and then there was an ad in the paper. They were looking for a young girl for a co-production called The Wolf at the Door (Oviri), with Donald Sutherland as the French painter Paul Gauguin. I went to that audition and I got the part. I didn’t really take it seriously – it was a just a holiday job, a fun ride – but I immediately felt at home with acting. It struck a chord in me. Then I got another part, and a third, and suddenly I had done three films before the first one opened, so it was a very explosive start. It was a very dramatic turn in my life.’
She started doing theatre as well – most recently a stage production of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander in Copenhagen. She met the writer of The Killing, Søren Sveistrup, 10 years ago on another TV show, Nikolaj and Julie. The romantic comedy won an Emmy for best drama and it was at the awards dinner that Sveistrup first mentioned a concept for a crime series, Gråbøl remembers. ‘I sat next to Søren and he said, “I have this idea I’m working on: I want it to be one murder case and a female detective.”
At that point the story was very different. It was set in a small town, though the ground elements were there.’
Sveistrup’s involvement convinced Gråbøl to commit to The Killing, though at first she struggled with her character. ‘I felt she was very remote from me; I’m much more communicative, I’m much more expressive and I had a lot of problems playing her in the beginning. At some point, I started thinking of her as a man just to get inspired. I think she’s very feminine but she seemed very strange to me. There are similarities [to me], of course: I think I’m stubborn like her and I can definitely relate to her loneliness. I know that feeling of isolation.’
Gråbøl baulks slightly at the feminist ideals that have been pinned on Sarah Lund, however: ‘She’s a hero in the sense that she’s good at her work and she finishes her job at any price, but she is socially handicapped. To me she’s not a superwoman at all.’
When we meet, the inevitable US adaptation of the first season is airing in Britain (on Channel 4) and Denmark. ‘I wonder if they changed the killer,’ Gråbøl muses. ‘They said themselves that they might but I wonder if they really have.’ Music from the city’s summer jazz festival plays in the background as we finish our lunch, interrupted occasionally by the bells of the town hall – a building that served as the setting for the political scenes in The Killing.
Shooting has begun on a third Danish series, while the second season, which Gråbøl promises has a more complex plot involving national politics on a higher scale, heads the BBC’s autumn schedule. ‘We’re having meetings this week,’ she says. ‘It’s very exciting and nerve-wracking because I think the story is going to be great, especially with my character. It’s so hard because in the second season we took her even further into the darkness. I hope you won’t be disappointed.’
