Claes Bang (“Claes” rhymes with “face”, in case you were wondering) only became an actor by chance, after he was persuaded to join a production of Hair at high school in Denmark. He was scared to apply to drama school. “I was sure they would say: ‘Thank you very much for coming, but no thanks,’” he says. But he was accepted and the rest – as they say in Denmark – var historie.
After appearing in multiple Danish and German TV shows and films which we won’t pretend we’ve seen (Lærkevej – Til Døden os Skiller; Rettet Raffi!; Überleben an der Scheidungsfront), as well as featuring in Borgen and The Bridge, Bang jumped into the mainstream after starring in Ruben Östlund’s satirical black comedy The Square, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes film festival. This led to the 2019 US drama The Last Vermeer with Guy Pearce, 2020 Dutch thriller The Bay of Silence with Brian Cox, the 2021 romantic-comedy heist movie Locked Down with Anne Hathaway, and Robert Eggers’ 2022 Viking epic The Northman with Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe and Alexander Skarsgård.
