Pilou Asbæk

In Lucy (2014) Pilou Asbæk is the boyfriend. He has known Scarlett Johansson's student for a week, and he handcuffs her to a briefcase and sends her across a Taipei hotel lobby to deliver it to a man called Mr Jang. He is cheerful and he is doomed, and he plays the handover like a man who has not yet done the sum while the film is already doing it for him. We liked him for the little time he had, which is not what the scene intends, and then he was gone and the film belonged to Johansson.

Nine years later, in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023), he is Kordax, king of a lost kingdom, introduced to Black Manta by a black trident that talks. It is the kind of part a film hands to a Danish actor with a reputation for menace, and it asks nothing of him but the menace. The film around him is loud, soft-edged and hard to follow once the first act is over, and Kordax is one more thing in it to keep track of. Neither film gives us much to judge him by. Both tell us how he has been used.

That is the shape of his English-language career: pirates, villains, kings of places that do not exist. Euron Greyjoy in Game of Thrones (2016–2019) made his name abroad; he has said he wanted to play him as a rock-and-roll star, and the complaint that the performance tipped into cartoon in the last seasons has followed him since. As Batou in Ghost in the Shell (2017), his second film with Johansson, he tried to make a cyborg bodyguard human by giving him beer, pizza and dogs, and critics noticed both the effort and how little room the film left for it. The Mule in Foundation (2025) is more of the same. In America he is cast for his accent and his background, as a foreigner or a villain, and usually both.

In Denmark the picture is different. He came up as Rune, a prisoner in R (2010), which Tobias Lindholm co-wrote and co-directed, and as Kasper Juul, the calculating, troubled spin doctor in Borgen (2010–2013). He and Lindholm have made four films together, among them A Hijacking (2012), in which he plays Mikkel Hartmann and for which he put on weight, and A War (2015), in which he plays Claus Michael Pedersen. Lindholm builds his films on research and on ordinary people under duress they cannot escape, and that, by every account we trust, is where Asbæk's best work is.

Asked in 2014 why he was hosting a song contest, he said: 'Always give them what they least expect.' Hollywood has given him exactly what everyone expects, several times over, and he has been game about it. Neither of the two films of his we have reviewed is the place to find out what he can do. The Lindholm films are, and a reader who only knows the pirate should start there.