This spring, film fans and theatregoers got a lot of Claes Bang for their buck, with the brilliantly named Danish actor starring in two of the most talked-about offerings of the season. In The Northman, he was the evil Fjölnir the Brotherless, stealing the crown of his nephew Amleth (Alexander Skårsgard). In “Daddy”, at the Almeida theatre in London, Bang played Andre, the gay billionaire art collector who struck up a relationship with a much younger, much poorer, emerging Black artist, and installed him in his Hollywood pad – complete with a real pool that drenched the front row.
Bang infused both roles with sinister charm – he was also, let us not forget, a superb Dracula on the BBC – while exhibiting a very Scandinavian attitude to nudity. In The Northman, he was swordfighting in the buff, while at the Almeida, a small venue in which there is no hiding place, he and co-star Terique Jarrett ambled around completely nude for quite a while. “I’ve done two plays where I was naked for the entirety,” he says. “I thought, ‘That’s it. I’ve done my naked duty. No more.’ But then I was approached for ‘Daddy’, loved everything about it, and it makes total sense that we are naked for that stretch of time.”
Bang is talking via Zoom from a cabin in the Danish countryside, which he and his wife, Lis Kasper, bought at the outset of the pandemic. “From Christmas 2020 to spring last year we were here 95% of the time,” he says, surveying an overgrown, deer-infested garden. “It was a nightmare to be in Copenhagen – there’s nothing worse than a city that is closed.”
Bang says working on “Daddy” was a much-needed antidote to The Northman, which was shot around Belfast before vaccines had been developed. If one actor had got the virus, the whole film would have been shut down.
“Filming during Covid has been a very alienating process,” he says. “For one thing, I have not been able to really see the director because everyone’s in masks and visors. I think, in the street, I’d probably walk past 95% of the people I worked with on that movie, because I wouldn’t be able to recognise them. Normally there’ll be a bit of socialising – you go out for dinner or to a football game – and we couldn’t do that, either. In the middle, I had a five-week shooting break, so I asked if I could go back to the cabin. But they wouldn’t let me leave.”
Bang was overjoyed to get back to the hands-on world of theatre – so much so that when the Almeida sent him an email saying he would have to be masked during rehearsals, he threatened to quit. “I said, ‘I’m super happy to do your play, but if we’re not allowed to work without masks in the rehearsal room, I will have to ask you to find someone else because that is exactly what I need.’ It’s become very clear to me during Covid that the contact thing is why I’m here.”
There is certainly plenty of contact in “Daddy”: snogging, spanking, sodomy. “I thought it was important that we really got in there,” Bang says. “And I have to say, the director and the intimacy coordinator and Terique and I, we did a really good, very respectful job of getting that relationship to be as alive as I thought it was.” Bang is a big fan of intimacy coordinators, who guide actors through sex scenes movement by movement, with the agreement of everyone involved. He recently pulled out of a film that had three major explicit scenes because the director wouldn’t employ a coordinator, saying: “I think they’re just in the way.”
Bang explains: “I’ve had directors back in the day who would say, ‘OK, it’s a sex scene. There’s the bed, get undressed, do your thing and I’ll be filming it.’ But I’ll say, ‘Um, but hey, excuse me, this will be far too private if you don’t say what you want it to be. Should it be a tender or a rough thing? Dominant or messy?’ If you’ve put the scene in the movie, you want to say something. It can’t be just about seeing two people shagging.’”
At 55, Bang is far too long in the tooth (and not just when wearing his Dracula fangs) to be pushed into doing something against his better judgment. After years as a jobbing actor in Denmark, five years ago he made an international breakthrough with The Square, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It stars Bang as an urbane art museum director who makes a succession of increasingly terrible decisions, from sleeping with a journalist played by Elisabeth Moss to commissioning a promotional video in which a toddler is blown up.
It’s a brilliant portrayal of the carelessness and weakness lurking within a middle-aged high flyer – and it made Bang into a singular kind of star. Not many actors speak four languages fluently – namely Danish, Swedish, German and English, which he speaks with an estuary-tinged accent that makes him sound a bit like David Bowie. Even fewer are touted by some journalists as possible Bonds, despite him being a grandad twice over.
Bang points out that in his wife’s family, everyone has children when they’re 20. “Children have come into my life in a little bit of a weird way,” he says. “When I met my wife, aged 39, she had Bella who was eight and Sarah who was 19, and now Sarah’s had two kids – the youngest turned two a month ago and the older one just turned 13. I don’t know how that happened but it’s been a blessing. It’s probably been the best way of getting children into my life because for some reason I couldn’t pull myself together and have some of my own.”
The pandemic descended just as Bang’s career was hitting full throttle – he had three indie films out in 2020, each barely making it into the cinema. Now, however, he is back in business, as a villain in Stephen Merchant’s The Outlaws, broadcast next month, in which he stars with Christopher Walken. “He really makes a fool out of me, but he was lovely.” After that comes Bad Sisters, a series for Apple TV+ in which he plays Anne-Marie Duff’s husband. As well as having a female showrunner, Sharon Horgan, and five female leads, all the directors on the show were women. “The whole entertainment business is getting serious about diversity,” Bang says. “I’m proud to be part of it.”
Which brings us back to The Northman, whose whiteness, machismo and Norse mythological roots have seen it embraced by some extreme right-wingers. “I remember when the trailer came out around Christmas, there was this voiceover that says, ‘You have to choose between kindness for your kin or hatred for your enemy.’ And I was like, ‘Woah, wait a minute – it’s Donald Trump!’ If it is being used by white supremacist groups, I think that’s bloody horrible. It was not something I thought about when we were filming – the script is based on the Danish story of Prince Amlet, the one that Shakespeare turned into perhaps the greatest play in the world.”
Bang spent much of the time lurking in his trailer, either trying to avoid Covid or preparing for yet another of director Robert Eggers’ many takes. There he indulged his other creative passion: music, which he releases under the name This Is Not America (and, sadly, not Claes’ Bangers). It’s not half bad, particularly if you have a weakness for 80s electro pop. I tell Bang that Tale of a Broken Heart, on his new EP, reminds me of the Johnny Marr/Bernard Sumner supergroup Electronic. “Oh my God!” he says. “That’s making me so proud. New Order, the Smiths, Pet Shop Boys – that’s my DNA.”
He finds music the perfect antidote to being ordered around by fussy directors. “I’m my own boss – I do the programming, the playing, the lyrics, the music. When you come home from a day of someone saying, ‘Go stand over there and say these lines, do it in that light and blah blah blah,’ you’re like, ‘Shut the fuck up and let me go and do my own thing. Stop following me around!’”
I suggest that Bang should play a few gigs, but he points out that his Spotify statistics aren’t exactly giving Harry Styles sleepless nights. “I’m not even sure, if I planned a gig, anyone would come. I probably have as many listeners per week as Billie Eillish has every 10 minutes.”
Notes from a Saturday Afternoon at the End of the World by This Is Not America is out now. The Outlaws is on BBC1 in June and is streaming on Amazon Prime in Australia.
