Kim Bodnia

Frank in Pusher is still the reference point. Nicolas Winding Refn's 1996 debut put Kim Bodnia at its centre as a Copenhagen dealer who owes money he cannot find, and the performance set the terms for everything after: a physically large man whose menace comes from ordinary, tired behaviour rather than from anything theatrical. He worked with Refn again on Bleeder, and Danish cinema kept him busy through Nightwatch, Terribly Happy and In a Better World.

Television made him international twice. He was Martin Rohde for the first two runs of The Bridge, from 2011 to 2014, and the series worked partly because his warmth had something to push against: the Danish half of that partnership carried the emotional weather while the Swedish half carried the puzzle. Then Killing Eve gave him Konstantin from 2018, a handler who manages to be funny and frightening inside the same sentence, which is a rarer skill than it looks. The Witcher cast him as Vesemir, and a generation of fantasy viewers now knows him as a mentor with a sword.

He also owns one of the odder continuities in Danish film. He played Jens in Nightwatch in 1994 and played him again in Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever in 2023, twenty-nine years later, in the same country, in the same franchise. The rest of the recent work is international jobbing at a decent level: Rosewater as the interrogator of the title, Serena, Delhi Belly, Young Woman and the Sea, F1 in 2025. Very little of it asks him to raise his voice, and none of it needs him to.