Meeting The Danish Woman
Writer-director Benedikt Erlingsson discusses making Icelandic series Danska Konan (The Danish Woman), partnering with “extraordinary talent” Trine Dyrholm as the titular character, and why he didn’t want to Save the Cat.
Aspiring screenwriters are often told to ‘Save the Cat,’ which means to help a protagonist earn the audience’s sympathy and support in the early stages of a story by having them do something heroic.
Yet in his new TV series, Icelandic writer-director Benedikt Erlingsson purposefully went against this well-used piece of advice. In the opening moments of Danska Konan (The Danish Woman), the central character does literally the opposite.
As Ditte Jensen tends to the small garden in front of her new apartment block in Reykjavik, a cat makes itself a pest in her flower bed, only for her to put a permanent end to its interruptions.
It’s a move that sums up Erlingsson’s attitude as a storyteller and Ditte’s own rebellious stance against conformity.
“Our idea was not to let her save the cat, and yet it still drew us in,” he tells DQ. “We are also interested in evil or bad guys or flawed guys, and we can follow them if the story’s good, if the story’s worth it, so it was an experiment to go against this theory of saving the cat.”
The six-part series stars Trine Dyrholm (Forhøret) as Ditte, who honourably retires from the Danish Secret Service to start a new life in Iceland, where she hopes to live her life in peace and anonymity. But she can’t stop being who she is – an elite soldier and a warrior. Soon, her apartment building becomes a battleground for a better world as she strives to help her neighbours with their problems, whether they want her to or not.
Juggling an acting career that has seen him take up roles in Ráðherrann (The Minister) and Blackport with writing and directing feature films such as 2018’s Woman at War, Erlingsson says he felt an impulse to make a TV show “because there’s easy money in TV.”
But as he began developing The Danish Woman, he admits it didn’t work out that way. “It took a long time to finance this,” he continues. “I thought we would be faster with it, because I was working on it two years ago. But the time was lost in the development.”
He wrote the scripts together with Ólafur Egill Egilsson. But while Erlingsson usually writes in a very structured way – “basically three acts” – this time their process was very much like “rowing into the fog,” exploring the characters and finding the story as they went on.
In particular, the director describes Ditte as a blend of characters such as Sylvester Stallone’s traumatised special forces veteran Rambo; Pippi Longstocking, the unconventional and unpredictable protagonist of Astrid Lindgren’s classic Swedish children’s books; and real-life French general Napoleon.
“Ditte is a ‘helper,’ much like the Western empire that brought her up, and she behaves like an empire: a well-meaning but militant state, focused on spreading its ideology, even through brute force if necessary,” he says. “Here, I hope that we, the Nordic, European and international audience, will see ourselves. Because in some way we are like Ditte, the Danish woman. We live in a culture that accepts Machiavelli’s sentiment: the end justifies the means.”
“In a way, it was the same subject as in Woman at War, about a woman who takes action and where the end justifies the means. But I wanted to explore that subject as a TV series and go a little bit deeper. We had so many ideas after doing Woman at War. It was a little bit like pouring out all these darker ideas, because Ditte is the darker version of the woman we saw in my previous film.”
Produced by France’s Slot Machine and Icelandic companies Gullslottid and Zik Zak Productions, the darkly comic series’ offbeat nature is characterised by its opening and closing credits, during which “extraordinary talent” Dyrholm stands atop a hill overlooking Reykjavik and dances to toe-tapping songs performed by the actor herself.
The director compares the credits to dream sequences, with the aim that they will draw viewers into the tone and style of the story they are watching. “The idea was to have her dance on the mountaintops, filmed all around Reykjavik, so she’s like a goddess in her dreams. That’s all we’re doing here,” he explains. “But when you talk to people and then you see them dance, it’s something totally different. Somehow, dancing makes us take off our masks and there is another being. I just realised I had never seen that with a very strong character – I had never seen James Bond dancing alone or these action heroes revealing themselves.
“It’s a sexual being, it’s an emotional being that appears. You show part of your sexual and emotional being by moving, and that was the goal. But Trine is a fantastic singer and we immediately turned the tap on that. So she is singing very famous songs, very famous Nordic songs, mostly Icelandic, Swedish, Danish pop songs, but she is turning them into new arrangements and all in Danish, so that was the concept.”
For a show set in Iceland and featuring a Danish protagonist, language is front and centre, with the series also featuring a large amount of English, which is used as a common language between Ditte and her Icelandic neighbours.
Erlingsson says this approach reflects the “reality” of language in Iceland, where he says English has become more prominent despite Iceland’s historical ties to Denmark – a point Ditte also makes.
“In Iceland, a lot of people come here and they have a problem speaking Icelandic, so English has become our second language,” he notes, “but we have a heritage as a Danish-speaking nation. It’s an ongoing thing in Iceland and her attitude is really justified, that we should be better at speaking Danish.”
As writer and director on The Danish Woman, Erlingsson often found himself battling with the competing “energies” of both roles. “I sometimes think the director can fuck things up for the writer, so the work of me as the director is to go back and read the text and see what I thought,” he says. And fortunately for Erlingsson the director, his scripts often resemble “a shooting manual,” where every sentence describes how the shot will look on screen.
That way, “on set, I am not improvising,” he says. “I am trying to get what I want and trying to follow [the script], because it is not a creative space for me. I’m trying to be as accurate as possible in getting what I need, but in the frame of the shot, we can look and we can experience [different things]. We did that a lot with Trine. She gave me many colours.
“We had takes where she was more sympathetic or less sympathetic, harder or softer, and I’m very grateful for that. I suggested she had maybe more angry attitudes and then she suggested softer attitudes and more sympathy, and then I could choose in the editing room. Usually I chose her sympathetic versions.”
Shooting the series was complicated, however, by the constraints of the main location, Ditte’s apartment block. It allowed Erlingsson to shoot up and down staircases and through apartment doors, as Ditte regularly visits and interacts with her neighbours. But it was a challenge due to the fact the apartment building was actually made up of several different sets.
“We had a staircase in one house, and then we had apartments in other houses, so we were mixing them up. One of our apartments was in the studio, and there was the cellar as well,” he says. “We were trying to mix this all together, and I had a DOP who was very experienced and was like, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry.’ I wanted everything to fit.
“But when it came into the editing room, we were not thinking about the logistics and the architecture of everything. We were in the story. It was easier to fake than I thought. But the problem was when there’s an open door and a staircase. There you have to fake the entrance a little bit. Then sometimes I had to rewrite something to make it easier.”
Following The Danish Woman’s world premiere at French television festival Series Mania earlier this year, the series is set to debut in early 2026 on RÚV in Iceland and Arte in France. It will also air on ZDF in Germany, DR in Denmark and YLE in Finland. The Party Film Sales is handling international distribution.
“I hope The Danish Woman will conquer the world, of course, and I hope this is entertainment,” adds Erlingsson. “But there is also an attempt to mirror the ‘Danish woman’ inside ourselves – the mentality of the warrior. In a way, it’s about facing up to that, and showing how sympathetic we can be with the warrior that is really ruining our society. That’s not the strategy to build a better society.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Trapped: An Icelandic crime drama set in a small village where a murder occurs during a snowstorm, trapping people and investigators together.
Bordertown: This show sees a detective move to a small town on the Finnish-Russian border to work less and spend more time with his family, until he is drawn into a series of disturbing murders.
Gåsmamman: A Swedish crime drama about a woman who is drawn into the criminal underworld to protect her family.
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tagged in: Arte, Benedikt Erlingsson, Danska Konan, Gullslottid, RUV, Slot Machine, The Danish Woman, The Party Film Sales, Trine Dyrholm, Zik Zak Productions