Kim Bodnia plays large, brusque men who turn out to be listening. His Martin Rohde in The Bridge is the ordinary half of one of television's best partnerships, and nothing he has done since has given him as much to do.
Fi1m perspective
The scene we keep coming back to in The Bridge (2011) has no corpse in it. Two detectives sit in a car; Sofia Helin's Saga Norén asks whether what Kim Bodnia's Martin Rohde has just said was a joke, and Martin explains, without irritation, that it was. Bodnia plays it as a man who has decided to be patient and finds he is enjoying it. He is a big actor with a heavy face and a soft voice, and most of what he does well happens in the space between the two.
He trained at the Danish National School of Theatre and came up through Danish cinema, noticed first in Nightwatch (1994) and then as Frank, the dealer at the centre of Nicolas Winding Refn's first film Pusher (1996). The parts that followed through the 2000s, in Denmark and Norway, were mostly hard men in crime stories: dealers, policemen, people who hurt other people for a living. The Bridge changed the size of his audience without changing the kind of man he was asked to be. Since then the work has been international television, Konstantin the handler in Killing Eve (2018–2022), a part in The Witcher (2021), and Hollywood supporting roles, most recently Kaspar Smolinski, a team principal, in F1 (2025).
Martin is the measure of him. He is warm, lazy, unfaithful and good with people in every way Saga is not, and Bodnia lets us watch him find her funny and then, slowly, find her admirable, so that the second feeling replaces the first over two series without anyone announcing it. He left after those two, and we missed him more than a supporting policeman usually earns. The third series is the weakest, and part of the reason is that Thure Lindhardt's Henrik Sabroe is damaged too; Helin no longer has an ordinary man to play against, and the show runs at one temperature instead of two.
The Hollywood work asks less. Our review of F1 did not mention him, and that is a fair account of how much the film gives him: a paddock to stand in and a Danish accent to be slightly menacing with. He has said that behind the layers there is always a softer side and that is where the real challenge lies, and in the international parts that side does not always get an entrance. He is still good at the layers. It is the thing underneath that needs a Saga to draw it out.
Start with the first two series of The Bridge, and watch the car scenes twice. He is at his best when the person across from him does not understand the joke, and he has not been given enough of those people since.
Biography
Kim Bodnia is a Danish actor. He trained at the Copenhagen Theatre School and began his career in Danish theatre before making his screen debut in the late 1980s.
Bodnia gained recognition for his role as Jens in the 1994 film Nightwatch and as Frank in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher (1996). He is known internationally for playing Martin Rohde in the series The Bridge (2011–2014), Konstantin in Killing Eve (2018–2022) and Vesemir in The Witcher (2021). He appears as Kaspar Smolinski in the 2025 film F1.
His awards include two Robert Awards and a Bodil Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He received a Golden Nymph Award and a BAFTA nomination for his television work.
