Hove plays men who have made up their minds and will not unmake them, and lets the body give out long before the mind does. Two leads for Hlynur Pálmason show what he can do; the parts have not yet asked for anything else.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the collar. Lucas, the young Danish priest Elliott Crosset Hove plays in Godland (2022), arrives in Iceland with it white and stiff, and by the time he has dragged himself across the island on horseback against everyone's advice it has gone grey, his cheeks have gone hollow and his eyes have not moved an inch. That is Hove's method in a single costume detail. The body keeps a record of the damage and the face declines to sign it. He does not underline any of it; the film has other people to do the talking, and he lets them.
He trained at the Danish National School of Performing Arts, graduating in 2015, and had his first lead two years later as Emil in Hlynur Pálmason's Winter Brothers (2017). Supporting parts followed in Journal 64 (2018), Before the Frost (2019) and Wildland (2020), with television in The Bridge (2018) and The Chestnut Man (2021). Then Pálmason came back for him, and Lucas is the part that took him beyond Denmark. Three films together is a pattern. Hove keeps being cast as solitary young men pushed to some physical or emotional edge, and Pálmason is the director who has most often put the edge in the frame with him.
What he does well is refuse to plead. In Godland he spends most of the film beside Sigurðsson's Ragnar, a guide who shares no language with him, has made up his mind about him in the first ten minutes and is plainly the funnier of the two. A lesser actor would fight for the scene. Hove concedes it and plays the priest's certainty straight, in the set of the jaw and the way he keeps his back to the wind, so that the comedy lands on him rather than coming from him. We came away sorrier for Lucas than we had expected and a little cross with him as well, because Hove never once lets the man ask to be liked. That is a hard thing to hold for 143 minutes and he holds it.
The notices for his leads have been warm without exception, and the one thing we would say against him is really a thing against the parts. Introspective, isolated, tested by the weather: it is a clear signature, and a clear signature is what an actor gets offered again. He has described himself as "a slow starter acting-wise", and on this evidence the start is behind him. Begin with Godland. Then, if you want to see where the collar came from, Winter Brothers.
Biography
Elliott Crosset Hove is a Danish-American actor. Born on 18 March 1988 in Copenhagen, he is the son of Danish-Greenlandic actor Anders Hove and American dancer and choreographer Ann Thayer Crosset. He graduated from the Danish National School of Performing Arts in 2015.
He is known for his collaborations with Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason, including the lead role of Emil in Winter Brothers (2017) and Lucas in Godland (2022). For the latter he won the Bodil Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 2023. Other film credits include April 9th (2015), Parents (2016), Before the Frost (2018) and Wildland (2020). Television roles include appearances in Dicte (2014), The Bridge (2018) and The Chestnut Man (2021).
