Søren Malling

Watch Torben Friis in Borgen (2010) decide what goes on the news. He does not shout and he barely moves; he says what the bulletin needs tonight, and the reporter either brings it or she does not. Malling never raises his voice across the series, and he makes the TV1 newsroom feel like the building where the real power sits, in a drama that is nominally about a prime minister. We kept waiting for the studio scenes. The palace argued; the newsroom decided, and he was the one deciding.

He came to this late. Odense Teater turned him out in 1992, and for more than a decade he did theatre and small parts on screen; the breakthrough was Jan Meyer in The Killing (2007), Sarah Lund's partner through the first investigation, when he was about 43. Friis followed in 2010, and from 2012 the films: A Hijacking (2012), for Tobias Lindholm, in which he plays a shipping executive negotiating with pirates; Hartmann in A Royal Affair (2012); A War (2015), again for Lindholm. He has made three films with Lindholm, who seems to have understood early what to do with him.

What to do with him is put him in charge of something and wait. He plays authoritative, cynical or tough professional men, and the performance is in the slow appearance of whatever they have been keeping down. He works from the outside in, watching real people for their mannerisms and borrowing them, so the results look observed rather than invented. He has put it plainly himself: "I think it's more interesting to watch stories where you actually show some vulnerability. That even the person who has to be cynical and efficient suddenly can't handle his personal life or his job." The executive in A Hijacking, cracking a little further with each call, is the clearest case, and the lead in The Investigation (2020) has been praised for the same understated quality.

The one reservation anyone has is that the films have not travelled as far as the television did; abroad he is still the editor from Borgen and the partner from The Killing. Which is a pity, because the shipping executive in A Hijacking is exactly the sort of part he should be offered everywhere. He is still working, in Danish film and television into the 2020s, with The Last Viking (2025) the most recent. He does not seem to be in any hurry, which is also true of almost everything he does on screen.