Main character energy

Main character energy


By Michael Pickard
January 22, 2025

The Writers Room

Writing partners Arnór Pálmi Arnarson and Jóhanna Friðrika Sæmundsdóttir explain how finding the right protagonist unlocked their Icelandic dramedy Húsó (The School of Housewives), about a young mother who attends housekeeping classes in a bid to regain custody of her daughter.

In the west of Iceland’s capital, Hússtjórnarskólinn í Reykjavík – the Reykjavík School of Home Management – can be found in a striking white building that dates back to 1921. Previously known as the Reykjavík Housekeeping School, it provides students with an education in traditional and modern skills from cooking and laundry cleaning to sewing, embroidery and knitting.

This grand building and the school that calls it home now serve as the inspiration – and filming location – for a six-part Icelandic series called Húsó (The School of Housewives).

Arnór Pálmi Arnarson

Produced by Glassriver for local public broadcaster RÚV, it stars Ebba Katrín Finnsdóttir as Hekla, a young mother who has been in and out of rehab since she was a teenager and must now enrol in The School of Housewives to get her daughter out of foster care. But will learning to knit, bake and clean make her a better mother?

Described as a dramedy that draws on weighty, dramatic issues with touches of humour, all packed into six 30-minute episodes, the series is written by Arnór Pálmi Arnarson and Jóhanna Friðrika Sæmundsdóttir, based on a concept, characters and story that were developed by Arnarson, Dóra Jóhannsdóttir and Sæmundsdóttir.

Arnarson and Sæmundsdóttir also both had dual roles on the project. Arnarson also directs, while actor Sæmundsdóttir appears on screen as Hólmfríður, the social worker charged with taking on Hekla’s case.

The starting point for the project was the school and imagining the characters who would live there and study together. But it proved to be a little while before Hekla emerged as the central character to build the story around.

“You have the chance to see a cross section of a community [in the school that] we can control and create, and have different views. So we did that,” Arnarson tells DQ. “But we gave ourselves a lot of time before we chose Hekla as the main character to tell the story. She was always there, she was always a struggling addict.

Jóhanna Friðrika Sæmundsdóttir

“Then what does she want and need? She wants her baby back, and she has to finish this prison sentence – we thought of it like a prison. Prison Break and Orange is the New Black were used as references, especially OITNB – it’s a female-led society within this ‘jail,’ and Hekla’s sentenced to be there.”

“She was a small character in the beginning, but then we figured out if you’re going to make a 30-minute drama, you need to have a really simple one-character storyline through the episodes to make it a whole. Then everything else can dance around that,” says Sæmundsdóttir.

After Hekla came to the fore, the writers thought about exploring different generations of women in Iceland and populated the series with characters including Sóldís, Hekla’s infant daughter; Erla, Hekla’s 55-year-old ex-mother-in-law who put Sóldís in foster care; and Guðrún, the 70-year-old headmistress of the school who is looking ahead to her retirement.

“I thought it would be so interesting with a small series to generate things that can happen to every generation of women,” says Sæmundsdóttir.

“We see three or four generations of women dealing with different stuff, but somehow coming together and helping each other out,” notes Arnarson. “For example, the relationship between the headteacher and Hekla – the headmistress is dealing with retiring, feeling pointless and having to spend time with her husband, who she has been avoiding her whole career, and Hekla, the addict who wants her kid – somehow they help each other out.”

The series spent several years in development after the writers were first introduced by a mutual friend – “Iceland is a small country,” Arnarson jokes – and began working on it “on and off” together while juggling other projects.

Húsó (The School of Housewives) stars Ebba Katrín Finnsdóttir as Hekla

They also took an unconventional route to production. Rather than partner up with a production company immediately, they spent the majority of that development time building the project together, even securing the greenlight from RÚV, before they pitched the project to Glassriver (Black Sands, As Long As We Live).

“We wanted to keep it close to us so we didn’t have time pressure, and also so we could control it for a longer time, rather than selling it,” Arnarson explains. “Then we got the greenlight from the broadcaster before we signed with a producer.”

It meant “we knew more about it beforehand,” adds Sæmundsdóttir. “Sometimes you have this idea and you start working on it and then you get the producer, but the money they will find for you controls too many things about the story. We wanted to know more about it before that process happened, so we were more sure about what we wanted to do.”

Even then, Glassriver was the only producer they talked to about taking the show forward. “We spoke to them and thought it would be a good fit,” Arnarson says. “I’ve worked a lot with them and I love them. But it was nice to have a concrete thing and a ‘go’ from a broadcaster, and then pitching to them.

“Sometimes the process is really not around the writers; it’s around selling an idea and then there’s a distributor and broadcaster and you follow that process. We wanted to try this, only for artistic reasons, and that was really nice. We got to have the project close to us for a long time.”

Hekla enrols at the titular school in a bid to get her daughter out of foster care

“The money is important, of course, and we need producers,” says Sæmundsdóttir, “but sometimes you get the feeling they control too many things. This series was sold as a drama series you can’t change into something else.”

That the series only found its lead character in Hekla late in the writing process is just one example of how the writers were able to shape the series at their own pace.

“This is about a girl who goes into this school and is fighting for her kid,” Arnarson says, “so we had to have the time to evolve it. Then we were also thinking about [making it] more of a comedy, but the drama is nice. It’s a dramedy I would say but, with good, strong drama, it’s nice to have this release of tension with funny stuff also.

“Things are not funny unless they have really dramatic, human problems to solve,” adds Sæmundsdóttir. “In that situation, things can be really funny.”

When it came to writing the scripts, the pair sat together to shape the outline and episode synopses before dividing up the episodes and completing them separately, while also sharing numerous phone calls. They then spent a weekend together at a farm to add the finishing touches.

“It’s so much fun when you’re writing the actual script. You’ve had so many conversations about the scene and this character in this scene, somehow it’s no problem to do that,” Sæmundsdóttir says. “That’s the least of the job, because the conversation had been going on.”

The show is produced by Glassriver for Icelandic pubcaster RÚV

The tricky part proved to be fitting numerous characters and storylines into just 28 script pages for each episode. In particular, episode four had to be cut down from its initial hour-long running time.

But what helped them – and director Arnarson in particular – during the writing process was the fact they could picture the Hússtjórnarskólinn building where the series would be shot and write scenes accordingly.

“We went to the location a couple of times, so we knew the layout of the school,” Arnarson says. “So when there’s a scene, they meet here and do this, it was all written into the location, so I didn’t have to figure out where this should happen. That helped a lot.”

Then during production, the dozen actors posing as Hekla’s classmates meant every day was a busy one on set. “They all had to be mic’d because they all had to improvise something to keep the classroom alive,” Arnarson says. “It was really busy and noisy every day because you’re shooting a scene between two characters talking about something but you have to have all of them in the frame [in the background].”

Sæmundsdóttir’s on-screen role came about following a discussion with the director once the scripts were completed, and though she had another character in mind, he suggested she would be perfect for Hólmfríður.

The writers used comedy to balance the tension of the series’ serious themes

“She’s the social services woman,” she explains, “the woman who has figured out that for Hekla to be able to get her child back from foster care, it would be a good idea for her to do [the school course] when she finishes rehab. She’s like the police in the life of Hekla, and then also a friend, as she gets a bit too emotionally involved in her job there because she connects to Hekla.”

Despite having to trim back some of the ‘B stories’ in the series to meet the show’s running time, the key to the show was placing Hekla at the heart of the drama. That meant the series became “so easy to pitch,” says Arnarson. “She’s out of rehab, she has to finish her sentence in this ridiculous school, in her opinion, to get her baby back. Whatever we write around that, if we stay true to that, we’ll be fine. Something I would do differently [next time] is I would stick to the main character and not try to tell too many side stories. We had to cut a lot of them out.”

“Another obsession of mine was killing all the men,” jokes Sæmundsdóttir. “We have men in the series but just in supporting the stories of the women, like women have been doing in stories for hundreds of years.”

But what they have been most surprised about since the show’s launch last year is that it proved a hit despite the fact “it’s a feelgood dramedy people aren’t used to seeing here,” Arnarson says. “It’s not a noir murder thing, or a comedy. ‘Feelgood’ was the thing people said to me. It ends on an up note.”

“A lot of people said to me, ‘We all watched it together. It was nice to be able to sit down and watch it with teenagers,’” adds Sæmundsdóttir. “It’s such a nice extra layer that we didn’t think about when we were writing it. It’s so much fun that people can watch it together with their family.”

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