Sofie Gråbøl

Sarah Lund stands at the edge of a crime scene in a knitted jumper and says nothing. Someone asks her a question and she answers a beat late, or not at all, because she is still looking at the thing in front of her. That is Sofie Gråbøl's habit on screen: she gives the camera less than it is used to getting, and she does not soften when the scene, or the person opposite, needs her to. It sounds like a small thing. Over twenty episodes it is the whole performance.

She began at 17, answering a newspaper advertisement, with Barndommens gade and Oviri in 1986, and never went to drama school, having applied without success. The Danish work that followed, in Nightwatch (1994), in the series Taxa and Nikolaj og Julie, and in Lars von Trier's The Boss of It All (2006), was largely emotional: women feeling things in full view. Then Søren Sveistrup wrote her Sarah Lund, and she played her across all three series of The Killing from 2007 to 2012, working with him on the character's past, her isolation and what she wore. The English-language parts that came after, Governor Hildur Odegard in Fortitude (2015), roles in Gentleman Jack (2019) and The Undoing (2020), have mostly wanted the Lund version, cool and in charge. Danish series including The Chestnut Man and The Last Viking have brought her home.

Our review of The Killing made Gråbøl the reason to commit. Lund is determined and fallible, and the point of the restraint is that it never tells us which quality is winning. We spent most of the first series anxious for her, and the anxiety came from Gråbøl's refusal to reassure us: her concentration on the case is total, it does not stop her being wrong, and nothing in her face promises she will be right next time. Sveistrup gave her a long investigation and she used every hour of it without asking to be liked. The jumper was her idea. "The director originally wanted me in a poncho. I thought: 'How would I shoot a gun?' So I wore knitwear instead, to contrast with the tough job."

The reservation is the one that follows any performance that size. Since Lund the international parts have mostly been detectives and authority figures, and there has been some talk of typecasting. We have not reviewed those series and will not judge them here. What we can say is that she is at her best when a writer gives her time, because her method is to withhold, and withholding needs somewhere to go. A two-hour film has less room for it than twenty episodes.

If you have not seen her, start with the first series of The Killing and take it at its own pace. Do not wait for Lund to become warm. She will not, and Gråbøl knows that is the reason you keep watching.