Bjarne Henriksen

Bjarne Henriksen is a large man, and Danish casting directors have noticed. Since the mid-1990s he has been handed the heavy, the labourer, the father who fills a doorway, and he has taken the parts and then done something the part did not ask for. He goes still. The interesting moment in a Henriksen performance is nearly always the one where the big man stops moving and you watch him think, or fail to.

The career is a television career with films in the gaps. He came out of theatre, Jomfru Ane Teatret and Svalegangen and then Statens Teaterskole in 1990, and took supporting roles in Danish films from the mid-1990s, among them the cook, Kokken, in Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration (1998). Television found him properly with Hotellet (2000–02), and The Killing (2007) gave him Theis Birk Larsen, the grieving father at the centre of the first investigation, and an audience well beyond Denmark. Since then he has been a fixture of the long-running Danish series, Borgen (2010–13), Badehotellet (2013–18) and Trapped (2015), with a return to Vinterberg as Ole in The Hunt (2012).

The Killing is where the weight of his reputation sits. Our review gave the credit to Sofie Gråbøl, rightly, but it also said the first investigation draws its strength from the family stories, and the family is Henriksen's. What held us across twenty episodes was watching an ordinary working man discover that grief is not a thing you can lift or hit. Theis is angry in the way of men who do not have the words, and Henriksen keeps the anger in the shoulders and the pauses rather than the dialogue. We were more upset by him than we expected to be, because the performance is built on carrying on rather than breaking down, and the carrying on is what hurts.

The other mode is gentler and easy to miss. The cook in The Celebration is a small part in a film about other people's catastrophe, and it is the sort of thing he does well: a working man at the edge of the frame, funny without appearing to try. Vinterberg has used him twice, and seems to know what Henriksen is for, which is plain decency with something unresolved underneath it. The limit is that he has spent much of his working life in ensembles and supporting parts, and stillness in a long series can read as furniture if the director is looking elsewhere.

He once said of Theis, 'Det var interessant at lave sådan et menneske, der sloges med sine urinstinkter': a man fighting his own instincts. It is a fair description of the part and of the best of what Henriksen does. Give him a character whose instincts are in the argument and he is worth your evening. Give him a uniform and a line about the weather and he will do that too, and you will not remember it.