If you read enough interviews with Claes Bang, the sturdy Danish star of The Northman and BBC One’s Dracula , you will start to notice a pattern. Interviewers won’t stop mentioning nude scenes. Then again, Claes Bang can’t seem to stop doing them. “I’ve done three plays with a lot of nudity,” he admits, including most recently Jeremy O Harris’s Daddy on the West End. “In Dracula, there was a lot. Plus there have been your odd sex scenes here and there. I have a friend back home, who said, ‘Are you ever considering doing something where you get to keep your clothes on?’ I was like, ‘What the f*** are you talking about?’ That’s when I started to think, ‘No more. We’re done with that.’ But I just did a movie in Paris, [L’Inconnu de la grande arche, expected sometime this year] and in the very first bloody scene, I’m stood in a lake, fishing… naked!”
The 57-year-old actor sits – fully clothed – behind a table in a central London hotel cafe. Nearly 6ft 5in, and wearing a plush, muted sweater, Bang feels almost too big for the furniture. It’s no wonder he made such a rakish Count, in 2020’s revisionist Dracula miniseries; a kind of easy erudition seems to waft out of him. You’d have to be confident, I suppose, to whip your kit off so prolifically, as Bang did in Dracula, for a lengthy nude scene in which he rampages through a convent of nuns. “[Naked] is just what we all are,” he muses. “I mean we’re all with no clothes, underneath our clothes. Right? But there’s always been an artistic reason for the nudity. It’s not something I do because I think it’s massively funny.”
