Rune Temte

Watch Rune Temte in Time Bandits (2024) and the first thing you notice is that he is the largest person in every room, and the second is that he seems sorry about it. His Bittelig breaks things, because he is enormous and the sets are not, and he apologises to the things he breaks. It is one joke, repeated, and Temte plays it not as a gag but as the character's whole way of looking at the world. In a series we found gentle to the point of drift, his was the gentleness we minded least, and more than once the thing we took from a scene was Bittelig saying sorry to something he had just broken.

The size came first and the acting came after. Temte played professional football for Strømsgodset, and was their player of the year in 1988, before he went to Drama Studio London in 1993 and spent the following years in Norwegian theatre and television, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream among them. The part that got him noticed outside Scandinavia was Ubba, the Viking warlord in The Last Kingdom (2015), and the parts that followed describe a pattern a child could spot: Bjørn, the Norwegian coach in Dexter Fletcher's Eddie the Eagle (2016); Bron-Char, a Kree warrior in Captain Marvel (2019); Anders in A Boy Called Christmas (2021); and now a Viking in Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement's Time Bandits. Somewhere there is a casting breakdown that reads "large Norseman" with his name pencilled beside it.

The complaint, made in interviews and fair enough, is that he has been typecast. What makes the complaint worth taking seriously is what he does inside the type. Ubba is remembered as a ferocious man played with humour and some nuance, which is not the usual description of a television Viking, and Bittelig is the same instinct turned the other way up: the menace removed, the humour and the care left in. Temte has described Bittelig as "a child in a good sense of the word", and that is what we saw, a man who meets everything with his guard down. It is a harder thing to play than ferocity, and he makes it look like no work at all.

What does not work is mostly outside his control. These are supporting parts in large productions, and supporting parts get what the edit leaves them. In Time Bandits the gang is written as five jokes, and ten episodes is a long time to tell each of them. He has done smaller and stranger things at home, in Heavy Trip (2018), Wild Men (2022), Blasted (2022) and Little Siberia (2025), and we have not seen enough of them to say whether the Norwegian parts let him do what the English ones do not.

What we would like, and what nobody seems inclined to offer him, is a part where the size is not the point: a man in a suit, in a room, with nothing to break. Until then the Vikings are in good hands, and he will go on apologising for them.