Much like the band LMFAO, the new Robert Eggers movie The Northman is about what happens when uncles and nephews stop being polite … and start getting real.
The nephew would be the main character Amleth, portrayed by beefed-up Swede Alexander Skarsgård. Claes Bang, who hails from Denmark, plays his uncle Fjölnir. Offscreen, both of them ostensibly enjoy the benefits of the robust Nordic healthcare model. Onscreen, Fjölnir kills his brother and Amleth’s dad, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), and kidnaps Amleth’s mom, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), thus setting his nephew off on a lifelong quest for revenge. Amleth grows up to become a fearsome berserker warrior, then disguises himself as a slave to gain access to his uncle’s farm. A bunch of stuff happens, the most important of which is that Claes Bang sports some of the best hair to come out of Scandinavia since Karl Ove Knausgård.
Eventually, the movie culminates in uncle and nephew stripping naked and having a sword fight (not a euphemism) (but also, not not a euphemism) by the edge of an active volcano. For these reasons and others, more and more people are saying it: who is Claes Bang?
“Claise,” as in “rhymes with chaise,” and Bang, as in “bang.”
He plays Fjölnir the Brotherless, a Viking warrior who kills his brother, takes over his kingdom, then loses that kingdom to another guy. He is forced to flee to Iceland with his wife and sons, where they take up subsistence farming, listen to Sigur Rós, and relax in the country’s many lovely natural hot springs.
He’s the textbook example of tall, dark, and handsome, plus so much more than that. Bang is seasoned: now 54, he didn’t really break out until his late 40s, giving him an inherent air of gravitas. He’s also beguiling and mysterious, and just menacing enough to play morally compromised—or outright villainous—really, really well.
6’4”. He’s 6’4”.
If you’re over the age of 55 or me, perhaps one of the many Nordic noir series that eventually become one big blur of murder and fjords. I’ll shout out a few of my favorite Bang appearances, though. In the Danish political drama Borgen, he interviews to be Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg’s spindoktor in the first season before crashing spectacularly during a televised debate. In season three of the Swedish-Danish series The Bridge, he plays a globe-trotting gigolo named Claudio, notable for giving me the opportunity to type the words “globe-trotting gigolo named Claudio.”
On the Anglophone side, he plays Dracula in the 2020 BBC series of the same name, which unfortunately I have not watched. He also has a recurring guest role in the fifth and final season of The Affair, which unfortunately I have.
You’re probably thinking of Ruben Östlund’s satire The Square, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2017 and raised Bang’s profile significantly. In it, he plays an art museum curator and has an awkward fight about a used condom with Elisabeth Moss.
There was also a 2019 thriller called The Burnt Orange Heresy, as an art critic who is hired by an evil art dealer (Mick Jagger, in a role that’s precisely as good as it sounds) to steal a painting from a reclusive artist.
And rounding out a two-year period where Claes Bang starred in 95 percent of art-related movies is The Last Vermeer in 2019, where he plays a soldier investigating art fraud.
He makes music under the nom de guerre The Last American and lent his voice to the “erotic podcast” Dirty Diana alongside Demi Moore and Lena Dunham in 2020. He is also appearing in the first British staging of Jeremy O. Harris’s Daddy, as the titular daddy.
See below.
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