Alex Høgh Andersen is at his most persuasive when anger and vulnerability are visible together. His Ivar in Vikings gives us more to value than the disconnected flashbacks of The Room Next Door.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Alex Høgh Andersen's eyes when he plays Ivar the Boneless in Vikings (2013). With the character's movement restricted, and crawling central to the performance, anger and calculation have to register in the face and upper body. Andersen makes that restriction dramatically useful: Ivar can seem dangerous without needing to stand over anyone. We found him unsettling because the hurt remains visible even when he is being manipulative. That is where Andersen is strongest: letting us understand an unpleasant character without asking us to forgive him.
An early film role as Anders Holm in A War (2015) came before Ivar made him internationally recognisable. The part took him through seasons four to six of Michael Hirst's Vikings, with filming from 2016 to 2020. Hirst's dialogue can be painfully blunt, and the series is often more persuasive when it lets its actors work without explaining quite so much. Andersen's reliance on physical detail suits that uneven material, giving us something to watch when the lines offer little to discover.
His subsequent film work includes Frederik in The Shadow in My Eye (2021) and Fred in Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door (2024). The latter gives us less to be enthusiastic about, without offering much reason to blame him. Alongside Esther-Rose McGregor as the younger Martha, he appears in flashbacks that feel detached from the film around them. Teresa Font's cuts back to the present come as a relief. Those scenes offer little basis for deciding how well his concentrated physical acting travels beyond Ivar, since we are mostly waiting for the principal story to resume.
We would like to see more film work that allows him to develop the contradictions he finds in Ivar. His forcefulness matters because sadness and intelligence are still visible underneath it; simply casting him to look dangerous would miss the point. For now, Vikings is the place to start, with patience for the dialogue and an appetite for the battles.
Biography
Alex Høgh Andersen is a Danish actor. He was born on 20 May 1994 in Slagelse, Denmark.
He is known for portraying Ivar the Boneless in the television series Vikings (2016–2020). His other film roles include Anders in A War (2015), Frederik in The Shadow in My Eye (2021) and Fred in The Room Next Door (2024).
