Spoilers for Jo Nesbø's Detective Hole ahead.
Guys... what have we just watched? All nine episodes of Jo Nesbø's Detective Hole on Netflix are an absolute rollercoaster, but one of the final scenes in episode 10 made my stomach turn.
As our hero Harry Hole (Tobias Santelmann) is piecing the clues together to discover that his work rival Tom (Joel Kinnaman) is actually a bona fide murderer, his penultimate showdown finds him pushed down onto a waterbed... that has the body of a woman inside.
In a split-second, the two are face to face, and you can virtually feel the dry heave sitting inside Harry's throat. It's shocking... but weirdly enough, not as shocking as the real-life story that inspired it.
I asked Nesbø and Santelmann to break down the gruesome crime drama scene — and what I heard was something I couldn't have ever been paid to reveal myself.
'I asked for a waterbed and they looked at me like I was asking for dirty magazines'
"I bought the last water bed in Oslo in the late 90s, when nobody bought the water beds anymore," Nesbø begins. "So I came into the store, and my doctor had said that because I had a bad back, I should buy one. When I asked for it, it was like I'd asked for porn magazines or something. But they had one down in the cellar.
"I had it installed, and maybe I didn't put enough bacteria-killing stuff in the bed, because after a while, when I got into bed, it started making these bubbling sounds. I'd lay there imagining that there's life evolving inside the water, intelligent life slowly developing into some kind of monster in my waterbed. That was actually the starting point of the novel The Devil Star [which the series is based on]."
Not in a million years did I think this would be the answer to my question, but it completely changes everything I know about both Nesbø and Harry Hole. But what about Santelmann? Was this all as freaky for him in the moment?
"I had the advantage of the script so I sort of knew what was coming," he explains. "But it's a freaky thing just to see, and so well done by the artists that made that character."
Thankfully, that wasn't a real person floating needlessly under a duvet and pillow. But there's no way I have even acted out the disturbing scene, let alone lived it for real.
