Claes Bang

Bang worked in Danish film and television for roughly two decades, on series like Taxa, Anna Pihl and 2900 Happiness, before anyone outside Scandinavia had reason to know his name. The break came late, when Ruben Ostlund cast him as Christian, the museum curator of The Square, a film that took the Palme d'Or at Cannes and won Bang the European Film Award for Best Actor.

What he is good at is charm with something wrong underneath it. Christian's decency is entirely presentational, a performance the man gives for himself. His Dracula plays the count as a guest delighted to have been invited in. John Paul Williams in Bad Sisters is the domestic version of the same trick. Bang is tall, well dressed and handsome in nearly all of it, and he uses that as camouflage rather than as an asset.

Since The Square he has worked across languages and mostly in other people's countries: Fjolnir in Robert Eggers's The Northman, Pontius Pilate in a Russian adaptation of The Master and Margarita, Spatz in The New Look, King Kristian in Stockholm Bloodbath, the title role in William Tell. He also records music.

It adds up to a European character actor who got his lead role late and has been spending it ever since, sometimes on very good films and sometimes on films that only needed a face.