Shaken and stirred

Shaken and stirred


By Michael Pickard
January 21, 2025

IN FOCUS

Disney+ and SVT series Whiskey on the Rocks blends drama with the absurd to tell the story of a Soviet submarine that ran aground off the Swedish coast in 1981. Stars Rolf Lassgård and Elsa Saisio, writer Henrik Jansson-Schweizer and director Björn Stein tell DQ how they made it.

The story of how a Soviet nuclear submarine ran aground inside a restricted Swedish military zone, leaving the world teetering on the brink of disaster at the height of the Cold War, seemingly has all the ingredients for a tense geopolitical thriller.

Yet try as they might, writer Henrik Jansson-Schweizer and producer Patrick Nebout couldn’t find a way to make this true story work for the screen. “Nobody died, and it’s quite an absurd story,” Jansson-Schweizer tells DQ. “Then Patrick called me one day and said, ‘Let’s do it as a satire,’ and it was like the puzzle came together.”

The resulting six-part series, Whiskey on the Rocks, explores an alternative version of what happened when a Soviet nuclear Whiskey-class submarine was spotted aground outside Karlskrona in the early hours of October 28, 1981. With global superpowers on edge, the eyes of the world turned to Sweden’s calm and collected prime minister, Thorbjörn Fälldin, a former sheep farmer, who faced the immense challenge of keeping peace between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and US president Ronald Reagan.

Rolf Lassgård plays Fälldin, starring alongside Elsa Saisio, Anders Mossling, Niklas Engdahl, Filip Berg and Adam Lundgren. Lithuanian actor Kęstutis Stasys Jakštas portrays Brezhnev, while the UK’s Mark Noble is Reagan.

To develop the series, Jansson-Schweizer called upon Jonas Jonasson to map out the story after their successful collaboration to bring Jonasson’s novel The 100-year-old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared to the big screen.

Rolf Lassgård as Swedish prime minister Thorbjörn Fälldin in Whiskey on the Rocks

“I pitched the idea to Jonas and he was like, ‘You had me at hello,’ so he wrote a synopsis that was brilliant and irresistible,” Jansson-Schweizer remembers. “From there, I started to write the script because I couldn’t just have it there [sitting] on my desk, and the rest is history.”

He then met Midnight Sun director Björn Stein “by coincidence” and immediately pitched him the show. Weighed down by a number of other offers, Stein said he would consider it, only to call back a few hours later to commit to the project. “So it was love at first sight,” the writer and producer says. “Maybe Björn wasn’t the obvious director to turn this into a comedy, but had seen his commercials from 20 years back and they are very funny. There’s a lot of comedy in there, so I thought it would be a perfect match.”

As it happened, Stein was seeking a comedic project and found what he was looking for in Whiskey on the Rocks after reading just a few pages of the script. But he was clear that the show shouldn’t play the historical events it portrays as a sitcom.

Instead, “my take on it was, ‘Don’t tell the DOP, don’t tell the production designer or wardrobe or make-up that this has some comedy elements. They should make it completely seriously,’” he says. “Everything is totally serious, but then the script doesn’t really deliver what the visuals are trying to sell. We had a prime minister who couldn’t really speak English, and then you had the Cuba crisis in his hands, and it’s like, ‘I’m not up for this.’ So that approach went very well with the situation.

“It was only in Sweden where this could happen,” he notes. “Switzerland doesn’t have any water around it, and Sweden and Switzerland were the only neutral countries where this could happen without having the repercussions [in the Cold War] it could have had. It [disaster] was very close.”

Finding the quirkiness of the situation wasn’t a challenge, with real events portrayed in the story including the occasion when the Swedes approached the sub in a rowing boat in an attempt to measure any radioactivity, and when they delivered supplies including pornographic magazines to the trapped Soviet submariners.

Elsa Saisio plays Aleksandra Kosygina, Soviet ambassador to Sweden

“Not everything is true, but most of it is actually based on true incidents,” Stein says. “Much more than you think has actually come from the real situation.” But the most “bizarre” part of making Whiskey on the Rocks was that it started before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Before then, the production team had imagined shooting the series in St Petersburg and hiring Russian actors.

“But during the production, the world changed,” the director continues. “We didn’t change at all, but the world around us changed back a little bit to where it was when it happened. World War Three was around the corner, with the nuclear crisis and the arms race and everything. It was really close then, but the world didn’t blow up – and maybe, hopefully, it won’t again. It’s crazy out there, and we’re just hoping that this, in some way, can instil some hope. Our vision was not to provoke anybody. That’s what it looked like, and now that’s what it looks like again.”

“We make fun of the Russians, but also the Americans and the Swedes,” says Jansson-Schweizer. “The satire kicks in every direction, and that was very important for us. This is a story about powerful men, men with too much power, so if we kick anybody, it’s men.”

One highlight comes in episode two when Reagan and Brezhnev participate in a foul-mouthed, insult-filled phone call, only for each of their female translators to tone down what is actually being said – and potentially avert nuclear war.

“If you look at how the interpreters influence the world, this is really what this series is about,” the writer adds. “We were on the edge of a war, but through the diplomacy we made it through. And that’s also the way to handle situations today, hopefully, so maybe we have a social comment in there too.”

Two submarine sets were built for the production in Lithuania

The trouble begins when Soviet celebrations on board the sub get out of hand, leading it to veer dramatically off course and run aground. Once the vessel is spotted by a Swedish fisherman, Soviet general secretary Brezhnev is alerted, while Reagan is informed of the “potential attack” on Sweden at the same time. Meanwhile, Fälldin is happier taking a break on his farm than wading into the middle of a geopolitical crisis and tries to avoid his US and Soviet counterparts for as long as possible.

“When I read it, I thought, ‘Could you make jokes about it?’ Then I talked a lot with the director, and he told me that he wanted to shoot close to a thriller, and to balance the comedy against the real events, the dramatic events. So that was a nice challenge,” Lassgård says. “I really enjoyed it. It was a very special thing to combine this thing with such serious business and the comedy.”

After accepting the role, The Man Called Ove and Blackwater actor faced the challenge of playing a real person, and sought out books and documentaries about Fälldin to better inform his performance. Notably, he also wanted to avoid comparisons to previous comedic portrayals of Fälldin that were popular in Sweden at the time of his premiership.

“I wanted to get away from that and do a very warm portrait of him because I really can enjoy thinking that a prime minister was, at the same time, a farmer,” he says. “That is something that makes a person very grounded and connected to people.

“He’s very open-minded. He has a lot of patience, but when it gets to a limit then something else happens. You will see in the series.”

It’s after the Swedish rowing boat incident that the Soviet ambassador to Sweden, Aleksandra Kosygina (Saisio), is introduced, leading her to strike up a relationship with Fälldin as they attempt to end the crisis. Yet it is largely due to his reluctance to speak English, and his mistrust of interpreters, that they build a firm bond and begin to hatch a plan together.

Lithuanian actor Kęstutis Stasys Jakštas as Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev

In Kosygina, “he found somebody that speaks Swedish, who actually should be the enemy, but they go very well together,” Lassgård says. “And Elsa was very nice to work with. She is a Finnish actress, and it’s one thing to speak Swedish with a Finnish accent but it’s another thing to speak [Swedish] with a Russian accent. She did very good work.”

“It was so much fun,” Saisio says of filming the series, which is produced by Humanoids. “Honestly, I loved every second. Because I didn’t know anybody beforehand, I thought I might feel a bit lonely, but it was totally the opposite. People were so warm-hearted and welcoming.”

The actor was invited to send in a self-taped audition for the role as the casting team sought a performer who could handle both Swedish and Russian dialogue. She also speaks English and Spanish. “Finland has been a natural place to look for actors who can speak Swedish and Russian, because we do study Swedish at school and some of us also speak Russian,” she says.

Yet Saisio was still supported by three language coaches through production, as she found herself to be the only non-native Russian speaker playing a Russian character in the show, which debuted in Sweden on SVT last month and now comes to Hulu in the US and Disney+ as its first Nordic original series tomorrow.

“I really tried my best and worked a lot to sound as good as possible,” she continues. “Then because in Finland we speak a very different kind of Swedish, I had to learn another style because [Aleksandra] was a Russian who had learned to speak Swedish in Sweden, so I have two accents that weren’t mine that I had to learn. If I ever get to play in Russian again, it will be much easier because I’ve done it already now.”

Saisio’s research for the part involved watching Soviet Union films from the 1960s and 70s that portrayed women as strong characters and in leadership roles, reflecting Elsa’s own personality and position.

Whiskey on the Rocks finds comedy in the real events that took place in 1981

“I also wanted to understand how exceptional it was as a woman to be an ambassador and live without a family or without having kids in the 80s, so that was part of it,” she says. “But then I also decided that was her decision, and that she was a very special woman who had chosen politics over family. Even though she understood that the situation [in Sweden] was very severe, she was also enjoying it, playing those big games, and that made playing [the role] so much fun.”

Lassgård and Saisio both spent the majority of the shoot in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital where the production was based. Other scenes were captured on location at Karlskrona.

Saisio particularly remembers her first scene on the set of the Kremlin where she was playing opposite Lithuanian actor Albinas Keleris as Yuri Andropov, who would succeed Brezhnev as general secretary of the USSR.

“He opened his mouth and Russian was coming out, and that was a moment for me where I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, am I gonna make it?’” she says of speaking the language. “I realised it was easy to come here to Sweden because people generally don’t speak so much Russian, but then it was so different to fly to Lithuania where half of the people are Russian-speaking – and the whole crew actually were native Russian speakers.

“When I entered the Kremlin and I saw fictional Andropov, I was like, ‘OK, that must be my level. But I managed, and I got some good feedback from them. There was this woman who said, ‘You nailed the Russian,’ and that was the biggest prize I got from the role.”

Early on in development, the producers had considered filming the entire project on a virtual production stage, without the need to visit different locations. “That was our ambition, but when we explored it, we discovered there were more difficulties to do it like that,” Jansson-Schweizer says. Instead, they went back to “the traditional way” and built two submarines in Lithuania – one full-size exterior and another interior set in a studio.

The series comes to Hulu and Disney+ tomorrow

They also found a dynamic way to switch the action between Sweden, the USSR and the US, with the camera pulling out to reveal a giant world map and then zooming back in to the next location. “You get this concertina effect where things are bubbling everywhere, and it’s crazy,” Stein says. “So that was key to visualise this crisis. This is a little Sweden stuck in between two major superpowers.”

“With the maps, I was a little bit sceptical in the beginning, but it turned out so well,” Jansson-Schweizer adds. “It also keeps the momentum in the show, so we don’t get stuck on an establishing shot somewhere. It was a brilliant move from Bjorn.”

Using different languages also helps to convey the global enormity of what was happening in a Swedish archipelago – and the potential ramifications for the whole world that remain acutely relevant today. “Not trying to do something in the same language, or everything in English, just adds to that world feel,” Stein says. “Although the events in the series happened more than 40 years ago, looking around the world today, it is frighteningly topical.”

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