Caspar Phillipson
Caspar Phillipson is an actor, born 1971.
Very few actors have a career defined by a resemblance, and fewer still have made it work this well. Caspar Phillipson is a Danish actor and singer who works on screen, on stage and as a voice actor, mostly in Scandinavian productions. Outside Denmark, he is the man who plays John F. Kennedy.
It started with Jackie in 2016, where he is on screen for roughly ten minutes and the likeness was widely described as unusually striking. What is interesting is what happened next: rather than becoming a one-off curiosity, the part became a franchise of its own. He has played Kennedy again in the television series Project Blue Book, in Blonde, in Hammarskjold: Fight for Peace and in Maria. Five credits gathered here, one man, four different films' worth of context around him.
The rest of the career is a working Scandinavian actor's, and it is more varied than the Kennedy line suggests. He appears in the Danish resistance drama Flame and Citron, the children's superhero film Antboy, the crime adaptation The Marco Effect, the horror sequel Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever, and the wartime drama The Shadow in My Eye, plus television in The Sommerdahl Murders, Oxen and The New Nurses. Hollywood came calling once, for a role credited only as The European in Mission: Impossible Fallout.
Born in Copenhagen in 1971, he occupies a strange and enviable niche: a character actor at home, and abroad, an institution.
Movies (12)
TV (6)
Where to start with Caspar Phillipson
Jackie is the obvious first stop and it earns it. The film is a formal, unsettling piece of work, and his handful of minutes have to do an enormous amount because the audience arrives already knowing the face.
Blonde and Maria make an interesting pair alongside it: three very different films, three very different registers, one recurring presence. If you want to see how far the impression can stretch, Project Blue Book puts the same figure into pulpy conspiracy television and gets away with it.
For the Danish half, Flame & Citron is the strongest film he appears in, a resistance drama with none of the usual moral tidiness. The Shadow in My Eye is quieter and harder. Mission: Impossible - Fallout is the pure curiosity: a Danish actor with a famous face, credited as The European.