Stenbeck to the future
A five-part biopic of Jan Stenbeck explores the life of the Swedish media mogul and reveals the personal cost of his professional success. Writer Alex Haridi, director Goran Kapetanović and executive producer Erik Hultkvist tell DQ about making Stenbeck (Vanguard).
At first, writer Alex Haridi wasn’t convinced that the story of Swedish media mogul Jan Stenbeck could be turned into a television series.
Offered the chance to adapt a biography of Stenbeck by Per Andersson after several earlier attempts had been abandoned, “at first I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever,’” he tells DQ. “Then I started reading the book and I just realised that there was so much about him that I didn’t know. I went from lukewarm to, ‘I really want to tell the story.’”
The resulting five-part series, titled Stenbeck, tells the story of Stenbeck’s controversial rise to power, and the cost of his success. Jakob Oftebro (Hamilton) plays the title character, who at 35 appears to have it all: a prestigious career at Morgan Stanley, a glamorous life in New York and a budding romance with American socialite Merrill McCloud. But when tragedy strikes his family in Sweden with the deaths of his brother and father, he is thrown into a leadership role at the family’s industrial group, Kinnevik.
Amid tensions with his siblings, he then pursues a path of innovation over tradition as he reshapes the company – as well as the Nordic media and telecoms landscape – by, among other achievements, launching TV3, Scandinavia’s first commercial television channel. His dreams of recognition and appreciation, however, are not always fulfilled.
Produced by FLX for public broadcaster SVT, it debuted earlier this year and the drama, titled Vanguard internationally, was recently named best series at the Monte-Carlo TV Festival’s Golden Nymph awards, where Oftebro also took home the best actor prize.
Haridi (Quicksand, Sanningen) describes Stenbeck as an “extremely divisive” figure in Sweden, where people either “idolise him and treat him like a god” or believe he “ruined everything” after upending the company’s business model.
“It’s this very classic story of globalisation,” the writer says. “There are these small towns where everyone worked at the factory and then he just came in and said, ‘I’m not going to do that anymore,’ so these small cities were just ruined.
“I probably had a very negative perception. Then reading about him, there was just so much [material]. I just got this image of this brother and sister arguing on the playground and then their stupid petty fight – which really isn’t about anything more than, ‘Does Daddy love you or me more?’ – just changed society in Sweden. We’re all living in the aftermath of this really childish sibling conflict. In a way, they’re like parallels to Greek mythology with these gods that don’t care about the little man, but they’re just fighting amongst themselves and then that affects all of humanity.”
Across the series, the story follows Stenbeck’s life from the mid-1970s until his death in 2002. That doesn’t mean 25 years are condensed into just five episodes, with Haridi focusing each instalment on a different moment in his life.
“The first one is in that period from when his brother dies to when his father dies, which is just half a year,” he notes. “The second episode takes place in 1981, so we flash forward four years and then tells the story of what happened in the fall of 1981. So we built a mosaic of his life.”
That means there are also big stretches of his life that the series passes over. But it is the emotions that carry viewers between episodes, meaning the fall-out from a decision in 1981 can still be felt in 1997.
“What I wanted to do was find those episode endings that are cliffhangers, that have this really strong sense of what’s going to happen now [in the series] but where we can still cut four years ahead – but not really emotionally,” Haridi adds. “A classic case would be the second episode with a court case. It’s a very exciting ending, and then when we open the next episode, we’re waiting for the resolution to come down from the High Court and that has taken a couple of years, but the question is the same question. So you do get those easy hooks into the time jumps.”
Director Goran Kapetanović faced a similar dilemma as he wondered how he could shift the series visually between time periods. Not just content with jumping from the 70s to the 80s and 90s, he also had to work with Oftebro to perfect Stenbeck’s physical transformation across the second half of his life.
In practice, Oftebro would be in the make-up chair for six hours and had to learn to walk while carrying additional padding under his costume.
“He was addicted to food and alcohol, so he was dealing with problems of his own,” the Caliphate director says of the real Stenbeck. “But to change a character weighing 75kg to 160kg required a lot of research.
“Sometimes it was a nightmare just to bring him [Oftebro] on the set. If you see all five episodes, it’s quite amazing how this actor and everybody in the script changes make-up through the story time frames, but he also changes physically so it was quite an achievement.”
Kapetanović also had a hand in casting Oftebro for the lead role and found in the Norwegian actor someone who could relate to Stenbeck’s family dynamics, meaning he would have the physical and mental strength to take on the part.
“He’s the only guy who speaks fluently all three Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Swedish and Danish) as actor,” the director notes. Oftebro also speaks English in the series. “The difference is quite big, but he’s really perfect. We didn’t use artificial intelligence for the voice. He was so good.”
“He has a great combination of softness and harshness,” says executive producer Erik Hultkvist. “He can be both very charming and kind, but also very harsh.”
“But it was really hard finding the right actor, just because of doing a show about a real person who everyone knows for a domestic audience,” adds Haridi. “Everyone knows how he talked, how he looked. And then it’s this really demanding role. He’s basically on screen all the time, and he has to be super charming and then have these moments of being a psychopath.”
For Hultkvist, producing the series proved to be more difficult than the FLX team first realised, not least because production had to move away from Stockholm to Göteborg in the south to take advantage of the location they had found to double for a 1970s home in Long Island.
“It was a struggle,” he says. “It was actually a very well financed show. We had financing from every source that you could possibly get for a Swedish production, but it still wasn’t really enough. Just a few months or so before the shooting started, we had to take away scenes and make things less complicated.”
One particular complication arose as the production designer struggled to find locations with period kitchens and found that despite the age of the buildings they looked at, the kitchens had nearly always been modernised.
Haridi remembers: “They’d be on me and say, ‘Do we have to be in the kitchen?’ I’m like, ‘Well, it is a story about a person who’s addicted to eating, so it’s hard to not have any kitchens in this story.’ There’s always weird things that you never think would be a problem.”
A London street was also recreated in Göteborg with the addition of some red double decker buses. “It looked like Camden,” Kapetanović says.
The director now hopes Stenbeck can line up alongside Downton Abbey and Mad Men as a show that will stand the test of time. “It’s quite a nice part of Swedish history,” he says. “I’m always trying to do TV shows you can watch in 10, 15, 20 years, so I’m not kidding when I say I think this will be in the top 10 of Swedish TV shows [viewers] could go back and look at again.”
“I’m actually really surprised that, at least domestically, everyone seems to love it,” Haridi remarks. “There’s a lot of like op-eds by business people who knew him back in the 70s who have written, ‘This was the Jan that I knew.’ So it was actually really cool to show both sides of that.”
There are also hopes the show will attract an international audience after its success in Monte-Carlo. Viaplay Content Distribution is handling global sales.
“I really think this is a television show that may be more of a universal story family,” says Kapetanović. “There are so many things going on there. It’s nostalgic in some way that we can recognise so many things. It will be interesting to see reflections from European audiences or abroad to understand Sweden a little bit in that time, but also the concept of how Europe looked in those days.”
“In the development process, I wasn’t trying to write to an international audience,” Haridi says, though he did have another target in mind. “There’s a young generation in Sweden that doesn’t have this history in the same way as people past 40 [years old] have, and I really wanted them to understand the story as well.”
He adds: “I was 100% writing for a domestic audience but at the same time writing for a 14-year-old who doesn’t know what the 70s were like in Sweden. It’s just a happy coincidence that audiences who aren’t Swedish are really engaged.”
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tagged in: Alex Haridi, Erik Hultkvist, FLX, Goran Kapetanovic, Jan Stenbeck, Stenbeck, SVT, Vanguard