Better days
Norwegian series Ølhunden Berit (A Better Man) follows a misogynist online troll who is outed by hackers and forced to live as a woman to avoid public shaming. Creator Thomas Seeberg Torjussen and stars Anders Baasmo Christiansen and Ingrid Unnur Giæver unpack this provocative tale of transformation.
While the international title of Norwegian series Ølhunden Berit – A Better Man – hints at a show revolving around a single protagonist, the story actually hinges on an intriguing juxtaposition between two key characters.
On one side is Tom, played by Anders Baasmo Christiansen. He runs his mother’s clothing store by day, but at night he is an outrageously misogynistic online troll who enjoys targeting feminists in general and famous stand-up comedian Live (Ingrid Unnur Giæver) in particular.
When Tom’s ongoing harassment causes Live to break down on stage, and later reveal his comments, hackers come to her support and succeed in tracking down Tom and exposing his identity. With nowhere to turn, he shaves off his beard and hides himself by wearing clothes from his mother’s shop. But scared, alone, homeless and devoid of his online world, he experiences compassion and warmth from strangers.
On the other side of the four-part series is Live herself, who becomes obsessed with Tom when the police suggest he may have committed suicide after he suddenly disappears.
“Well, I’m glad you see them both as protagonists,” creator, writer and director Thomas Seeberg Torjussen tells DQ, “but it started out with Tom and the idea of pushing someone like him into society, and this very banal irony of a misogynist having to hide as a woman and seeing the world open up to him. Then Live came along and it developed into what it is, but it started with Tom.”
Describing Tom as man “flirting with a lot of edgy, contrarian stuff,” Torjussen notes that the character’s views are perhaps no longer contrary in contemporary society, which gives the show a timely topicality. “When you get into the third episode, he has this long monologue about how the feminist state has made him soft and unattractive to women because that’s not really what they want,” he continues.
“So the idea for him to have someone to blame for his loneliness and misery is probably a sweet thing to suck on. But it’s a good question [about whether Tom actually believes the things he writes] because I think he believes parts of it, but also he’s just being contrarian in a very egalitarian society in Norway.”
Making Live a more prominent character in the series means viewers become witness to the impact Tom’s messages have on her, as well as her growing fixation with him. As a comedian, she also takes aim at men and masculinity – the catalyst for Tom’s attacks – “so I wanted to have this character where she has to think about the way she talks about men in the end,” Torjussen says. “It’s a polarising thing, and so you need the other part as well, and Live is that character. Ingrid brought something to her that makes them very much two protagonists, which I’m very happy about.”
Torjussen previously worked with Christiansen on his dysfunctional family comedy-drama Koselig med peis (Norwegian Cozy), in which 36-year-old Georg (Christiansen) is ready to be a grown-up but is afraid of turning into his father.
Fourteen years after that show aired, the pair have reunited. “Of course, I loved it. It’s such good writing and I know Thomas well,” the actor says of A Better Man. “Actually, he wrote this script many years ago, so I’ve been involved in the process as it’s developed. But there’s a heavy part of loneliness in this character, and it felt like that when we shot it as well, because there were a lot of scenes all by myself, only sitting there trolling. It felt kind of lonely.
“So I really was happy when I saw the show together with Ingrid and Jonas [Strand Gravli], who’s playing a neighbour, Audun. I feel that it’s really three characters carrying the weight together. It didn’t feel like that when I was shooting it, but I’m really happy with the results.”
Christiansen says Tom has found the companionship he craves in his online community, and the character has come to believe the things they discuss. But his world comes crashing down when he is exposed and reporters flock to his mother’s clothes shop, before he finds an elaborate way to escape their attention.
“It’s not a secret that he’s becoming a better man,” he says in reference to the title, “so I think his journey is a roller coaster, and it’s sometimes over the top. But for me, it didn’t feel like that when we shot it. You see in the first episode that he tries to commit suicide, and when he doesn’t even make that happen, he has no further way to go down, so then you just have to try to crawl up again and make the best out of it. Dressing up as a woman, he surprisingly meets people and also finds friendship and love somewhere.”
Giæver says she isn’t on social media as she wants avoid the kinds of messages Live is subjected to in the series. But such was the “beauty” of Torjussen’s writing that she felt a lot of sympathy for Tom as she read the scripts for the first time.
“It was clear from the start that Tom lives in an echo chamber – but Live does as well,” she says. “She annoyed me and I loved her at the same time. She has all the things Tom doesn’t have. She has love and a family and friends and a community, but she also has this really difficult situation where she gets a lot of hate each day. People say the most horrible things to her. Trying to understand this other person is what really drew me to the character.”
Even though she receives terrible messages over the internet, Live cannot be drawn away from her phone or her social media accounts, and is thrown into shock when the police reveal Tom might be dead after his true identity is revealed.
“She’s seeing her own echo chamber and how she has so much more power over her life and the public than he ever had, which is an awakening for her,” she says.
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“I also really like that we’re introduced to Tom, who’s an incel type of guy where his whole life is online. But during the series, we only see a few scenes with Tom sitting at his computer, while Live is constantly on her phone or on her computer. For almost all the scenes from her home, I spent the whole day of shooting on the couch with the phone.”
Tom and Live only have a handful of scenes together in the entire show, which is produced by Maipo Film in collaboration with Artbox for Norway’s NRK and ZDFneo in Germany. But despite their lack of shared screentime, the two characters are unquestionably connected through the story.
“Both Live and the neighbour are obsessing a little bit about Tom and his whereabouts and his fate, so when we’re away from Tom, we’re with the two people who care the most,” Torjussen observes. “It’s fun, and when TV series and films have multiple plots, you can really push one character up and another down. When Live is super worried, he’s having a blast, and you can play with this dynamic of shifting back and forth. That’s not the hard part of the writing.”
Of course, there is another central character in A Better Man – Tom’s alter ego, Berit. Christiansen says actually plays four characters in one, shifting from Tom to Berit, then “Berit 2.0” and finally back to Tom.
“Tom starts in one place and ends up as a totally different man, a better man, and in between we have Berit 1.0 and Berit 2.0. Of course, it helps with the wig and the dress, but it was a natural process for me,” the actor says. “We talked about it that Tom was this caterpillar, and he goes through a butterfly process, so it was much easier to find Berit 2.0 and Tom in the end, who were grounded and more secure in their core, they’re more whole.
“But with both this insecure Tom with a beard and the first steps as Berit with the blonde wig, it was harder to find the physical language, and I believe it’s because they are not secure in themselves. I had to be patient to find the physical language and the physical expression [as Berit] because Tom’s not a woman, he’s just dressed like a woman.”
Playing such a complex role, Christiansen says he could understand the loneliness that has “destroyed” Tom. “I feel sorry for him, of course,” he says. “It surprises him that he’s treated differently [as a woman] but, at the same time, he has to be braver to meet people as Berit than Tom. I don’t know if it’s only the women’s clothing, but he’s pushed out there [beyond his comfort zone]. He had to be kicked out.”
Giæver says she could relate to Live in many ways, but had to find the same confidence her character has to be able to perform stand-up comedy on stage in front of a live audience. “That was my journey,” she says. “Also, I’m not a famous person, so how does a famous person act in different rooms and stuff? That’s what I looked for. But it was a much easier type of transformation than what Anders had to do.”
Even though the series was first conceived by Torjussen several years ago, he has rewritten and updated the story as the topics at its heart have become more relevant and topical. In fact, A Better Man was originally considered as a feature film, but when Torjussen couldn’t secure financing, NRK asked him to consider turning it into a miniseries.
That allowed him the chance to broaden out the story and the themes, and update it again. “It feels relevant but it doesn’t feel as contrarian anymore,” he says. “But then there are parts of the story that are universal – going from isolation to meeting people, which is as much about the digital age than anything else. It would also have been great last year or in two years’ time.”
With filming taking place in Lithuania, making A Better Man was “just the best experience I’ve ever had,” says Giæver, adding that she “loved” every moment of making the show despite only sharing two shooting days with Christiansen. She also found herself with a continuously changing roster of acting partners due to the number of different characters Live interacts with.
“So I was alone in being there, having people come and go,” she remembers. “Thomas, Anders and I had some readthroughs and stuff before, and Anders is such an experienced and wonderful actor, he really took me in and helped me a lot, so that was great. Every day that Anders and I were in Lithuania together, it was really nice.”
“It’s not every day you have such a good script and then it’s fun. But it was heavy days, long days and I felt like a lonely character, so Ingrid thank you for the nice words. Meeting you for those couple of days was like adrenaline,” says Christiansen.
“The last two shows I did were with amateurs, with kids, so just having Ingrid on the show, my absolute favourite actress, it was such a treat for me,” adds Torjussen. He also reunited with Norwegian Cozy DOP Daniel Voldheim – they first met each other at film school – and partnered with co-director Gjyljeta Berisha (22 Juli).
“She is the most amazingly alert director I’ve ever had, so it was my best shoot ever. We shot the whole thing in Lithuania and I’d never done that before, but just staying in a hotel and working the whole day never made me tired because everything made the show better and everyone contributed in an immense way. Most people we talked to said this was a really nice shoot for everyone.”
Following its world premiere at French television festival Canneseries last month, where Christiansen was named Best Actor and A Better Man received the Best Series prize and the High School Award, the show is now set to debut locally on NRK later this year.
But Torjussen hopes the series, which is distributed by Beta Film, will travel across borders, offering viewers a local story with universal themes. “I was hoping that maybe telling this story from where we are [in Norway] would be interesting, but it could also be just alienating. I have no idea,” he says. “Writing something from within Norwegian society and seeing how the Germans read it or the Spanish read it is the most interesting part of writing for me. So I want a huge audience everywhere so I can follow it and see what people make of it.”
Christiansen describes A Better Man as being among the top three scripts he’s ever read, alongside Norwegian Cozy and political period drama Makta (Power Play). “It was hard work and a big challenge,” he says about making the show, “but it’s much harder to breathe life into bad scripts, so when the script is good, it’s just joyful.”
“I love Thomas’s brain because he can do so many things at once, but I really do feel like it’s a show about trying to exist in a society that’s more and more antisocial in a way,” says Giæver. “We’re all on our phones and communicating through things. And I love Live’s journey into trying to understand Tom and trying to have an honest conversation with a person so different from yourself. For me, it’s the number-one script I’ve ever worked on.”
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tagged in: A Better Man, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Artbox, Beta Film, Ingrid Unnur Giæver, Maipo Film, NRK, Thomas Seeberg Torjussen, ZDFneo, Ølhunden Berit