Having taken till the age of 50 to go from working actor to film star, Claes Bang knows not to complain about being swamped by work. Nonetheless, by the end of last year it was all starting to get a bit much for the Danish actor best known for playing Dracula in the BBC’s 2020 adaptation.
Since breaking through in 2017 in Ruben Ostlund’s Palme d’Or-winning art world satire The Square, Bang (whose first name rhymes with “face”) had accepted a “greedy” number of roles. In 2018 alone he worked on five films (including The Burnt Orange Heresy opposite Mick Jagger and The Girl in the Spider’s Web opposite Claire Foy) and had a regular role in the television series The Affair. He spent much of 2019 making Dracula. And, although lockdown knobbled some juicy jobs, he spent the second half of 2020 playing a Viking in The Northman opposite a cast including Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy.
Since last June he has been living alone in a flat in north London, while his wife, Lis Kasper Bang, stays at their home in Copenhagen. He has been appearing in Sharon Horgan’s forthcoming dark comedy series, Bad Sisters, for Apple TV+, and playing a gangster in Stephen Merchant’s BBC series Outlaws.
It’s set in the backyard of a plush home in the Hollywood Hills too. Which means . . . “We have a fully functional swimming pool on stage,” says Bang, 54, with a more innocent version of the sort of enthusiasm Dracula might show at the appearance of a virgin’s bare neck. “You can do laps in it! I’ve never seen that in a show. There’s going to be water everywhere.” Said pool, it turns out, will be kept at 36C throughout. Bathtime!
He is being slightly facetious, he admits, about what drew him to the role. But only slightly. And he did read the play before signing up. Yet the chance to work with a small group of people after megaprojects — and the red tape and memos they bring with them — was a huge draw. “It’s not that there is anything wrong with the [large-scale] way of working, it just leaves you wanting the other thing.”
In the flesh Bang is as tall, dark and handsome as you’d expect, much friendlier than his more imposing roles might suggest. At his suggestion we decamp from the rehearsal room to an evening meal at a pub, where he nonetheless shuns all carbs apart from a carafe of chardonnay. “I am not doing bread at the moment,” he says. “I’m appearing naked and I need to be super-slim.”
Yes, that swimming pool brings with it a need for Bang to bare his flesh, as well as to get intimate with his co-star, Terique Jarrett. He is fine with that, even if his friends have started to tease him that he will only play a part if it involves nudity. “Jeremy has deliberately written that these two characters are very physical with each other. So we’re working on that. We have intimacy sessions.”
Bang, it should be said, had previously decided he had “done my naked duty” after stripping for several films and for his previous stage show, Sauna, performed in the nude in a 42-seat theatre in Copenhagen. Still, needs must for the story. Likewise, it should be said, having to be a white guy who uses the n-word on stage.
“A black guy has written this, and put that word in his play many, many times. And it is part of the play for a very good reason,” Bang says. While they are rehearsing, though, they are using the word “person” instead. “There are five black people and four white people in this cast and so in order for them not to feel uncomfortable, I totally get this.”
Daddy will also mark the first time that Bang has sung on stage. And that’s despite having a sideline as a singer-songwriter, releasing electropop albums under the name This Is Not America. This is another way of him gaining some control of his career.
“It’s a bedroom project,” he says — his present single, Tale of a Broken Heart, is one of many songs he wrote in Belfast during filming of Northman. “I stream per week on Spotify what Billie Eilish does in a second.”
Wouldn’t it be more commercial if he went under his own name and called his album Dracula Sings? Perhaps so, but when he was starting out he was advised not to use his real name because Danish radio had a prejudice against actors turned pop singers. And the name This Is Not America, taken from the David Bowie song, is a nod to Anglocentric musical leanings of a scary sexy vampire whose favourite album is Upstairs at Eric’s by Yazoo.
Music was his thing growing up too. His parents divorced when he was eight, and he moved around Denmark, living mostly with his father, a salesman, learning how to fit in at different schools. Appearing in a school production of the hippy musical Hair made him realise he might have something as an actor. Meanwhile, two month-long teenage exchange trips to Britain helped him to become a near-flawless English-speaker with a neutral accent that offers an estuary twang.
He went to drama school late, but he has supported himself as an actor since leaving the Danish National Studio of Performing Arts in Copenhagen in his late twenties. Even during some slim years. “You do your commercials, or voiceovers, all kinds of stuff.” He married Lis, a make-up artist and former model, in 2010, becoming the stepfather to her two daughters, both now grown up.
It was The Square that changed everything, though. “It opened so many doors. It showed people I’ve got really decent English, I’ve got 30 years of experience, and it turned out I could carry a movie that is two and a half hours long. So people went, ‘Well, let’s hire that guy.’ ”
He had just turned 50. As offers came in, he went with the flow. “I got greedy. Totally. I was like, ‘OK, this is my momentum. I’m just going to ride it.’ I tried everything I thought was interesting. It was crazy. But I was also like, ‘If this happens, I can pay off my mortgages.’ Which I have done. And I was just like, ‘I may only have like, three years doing this.’ ”
Might he have been a good James Bond? “It would have been great,” he says, but he is too old now. “Don’t you think? I’m 55 in a few weeks.” He has always been in thrall to English culture, loves it here, but is also pragmatic about work. “Denmark is tiny. It’s five million people. And there are only so many movies and plays a year.”
He suspects that Northman, with its potential appeal to fans of Game of Thrones, has a good chance of making a big impact. Making it was not, though, a blissful experience. After Covid delays, it resumed in the summer of 2020 with stringent safety measures, though. Filming went on for months. “And then it’s a Viking movie. We were always stood on super windy hillside somewhere outside Belfast with sheep, and cows and owls and ravens and horses, and it was icy f***ing cold.”
The director Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse) was “very much about authenticity”, he says. “The one thing that really f***ing annoyed me was that we were wearing what they were wearing as footwear, and that is basically a leather sock.
“And when you’re knee-high in mud in a leather sock, and it’s icy cold, let me tell you this . . . The biggest accomplishment of the Vikings was not sailing those ships from here to North America. It was getting through life in footwear that shit. F***ing hell, mate.”
Still, now he is mortgage-free, while there is still a pension pot to fill, he feels he needs to spend more time at home. “My wife was over at the weekend and when she left I was super sad, I thought maybe I’m missing out too much.”
She asked him if, with his Jagger connections from their film together, he could get them into the Rolling Stones’ summer tour. Bang, not quite as suave as his screen characters can be, isn’t quite sure how to play that one. He imagines the call: “ ‘Hey Mick, it’s Claes . . . from that film . . .’ I don’t really know how to go about something like that.”
First, though, there is Daddy: five weeks in a subsidised 325-seater. Not, one imagines, a big contributor to that pension pot. “No! This is crazy! This is f***ing mental, this is worse than subsidised theatre in Denmark. This is for the art! This is not to get rich. This is for the health of the instrument.”
Daddy is at the Almeida, London N1 (almeida.co.uk) to April 30
