Claes Bang. Photograph: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
“If I could travel back to when I was 18, and tell 18-year-old me what my life looks like now, I think that would have reassured him,” says Claes Bang.
Even so, the younger Bang might be a little surprised by the developments of the last 10 years. After two decades of steady film and TV work on home turf, the Danish actor was catapulted to international stardom at the age of 50 as the lead in Ruben Östlund’s wicked, Palme d’Or-winning art-world satire The Square. His performance as a high-flying museum curator in moral and professional freefall demonstrated both a suave old-school masculinity and an aptitude for antic, vanity-free comedy that has since served him well in a range of projects — from the especially urbane interpretation of the eponymous count in the BBC’s 2020 Dracula to the mercifully deceased villain of Sharon Horgan’s Irish TV hit Bad Sisters. He’s also a musician: under the moniker This Is Not America, he’s recorded one synth-pop album and ten EPs.
Bang returned to Cannes this May, for the first time since The Square’s triumph, to premiere his first French-language film: The Great Arch, a gripping drama of systemic conflict in which he plays Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, the real-life Danish architect who, despite a low international profile, won a 1983 competition to design Paris’s bold, divisive Grande Arche monument. What ensues is a dark, complex study of creative ideology put through a veritable bureaucratic obstacle course – think The Brutalist with even higher stakes and more red tape, beautifully played by Bang alongside co-stars including Sidse Babett Knudsen and Xavier Dolan. The film has its UK premiere tomorrow at the French Film Festival in London – with Bang in town to present it – before playing further dates across the country. He took time out to answer the Nerve’s Q&A over videocall from his home in Copenhagen.
Claes Bang and Michel Fau in The Great Arch. Photograph: Julien Panie/Agat Films/ Le Pacte
The Great Arch is about a Danish artist navigating culture clashes as he launches an international career – did you relate to your character on that level?
I find it quite easy to adapt. But I think one thing is, in Denmark, we're not big on authority. It's quite a flat structure here. So when there’s a whole hierarchy of power, that’s where we sometimes have a problem, and so it is for my character here. Sometimes I've realised: whoa, what did I just say to that high and mighty producer that I'm not actually allowed to speak to?
Much of your dialogue is in French, which you didn’t speak going in. How does that work?
In English, or in my own language, I feel totally free. I can play along if someone improvises a little, or if the scene starts to move in a different direction. That liberty is something I very much treasure, and I don’t have it in French. So I just went through the script five hours a day, every day, for three months, learning not only my own lines, but also everybody else’s, so it got to a point where I could take direction and move with the script. It was still a little bit of a prison; I am not free in that language. But that was the case for the character too.
If you were made prime minister today, what’s a change that you would make?
Well, in Denmark, there's not a major thing that I would change, because we still have democratic dialogue. We're still quite a liberal and open country, and we don't get punished for what we say or think. You start to worry when that’s not a given. I'm super worried about the rise of the far right everywhere. We had them come really close to power in Denmark in the 2000s. So when you look around Europe or the States and see what's going on, you get really appreciative of what you have.
I have to say, I'm worried about your country. I've worked there so much now, I've really developed a relationship with it, and it's probably where I would go if I wasn't living in Denmark. And it's just so worrying to sort of see the support for someone with absolutely no qualifications, like Farage, when he's absolutely, completely, utterly useless. But people get behind him out of frustration, out of anger with what is going on.
What has given you hope recently?
Well, hope just now is to see that there are voices that go in the other direction. What happened in the States last week, with Zohran Mamdani winning in New York, and those two elections in Virginia and New Jersey. And Geert Wilders losing in the Netherlands. There are still forces and voices out there that speak loudly enough for people to hear them.
Who is your hero or heroine?
It sort of shifts in the sense that, right now, it’s those people. People like Mamdani, who really stand up for what they believe in and actually manage to make a difference. But obviously David Bowie too, always.
Do you have a favourite decade, and why?
It has to be the 80s, right? I turned 13 in 1980, so those were my formative years. All the music that I still keep coming back to is from that decade. It's probably very obvious from the music that I make myself that I've been listening far too much to New Order and Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys and Bowie and all that. That is definitely my era.
How do you react to being called a sex symbol?
Well, that’s a very weird question, because I did not know that I was being called a sex symbol. I'm almost 60, man. But if that is something people are saying, that's great. I mean, who doesn't want to be a sex symbol?
How do you feel about nude scenes?
I think I’ve done my nudity duty. There is such a thing, and I’m really fed up with it. It actually ended at the Almeida theatre, when I did Jeremy O Harris’s play Daddy in 2022. Because as much as I loved, loved, loved doing that – it was one of the best decisions ever in my life to go and do that, amazing people, amazing script, amazing everything – it is really something to take off all your clothes and stand there, in the nip, in front of a house of 300 or 400 people. I’ve now done three plays where I was completely naked all the bloody time.
And then when I did Dracula, that was like two days of standing in an archway in Slovakia in minus five degrees, covered in goo and slime and all, with the wind just sweeping through. Deciding to do that with no clothes gave me the freedom to just move around – because Dracula at that point is a wild animal. It was a good decision creatively. Health-wise, probably not so much. I’m done with it.
Do you have a favourite swear word? How often do you use it?
Cunt. When I’m in your country I say it all the time. And I'm terribly sorry, because I know people have a very tough relationship with that word. But it just sits so well in your mouth, doesn't it? It's just lovely to say it. And then it's just such a bad thing to say. So you should probably be a little bit more careful with how much you use it, because it really is harsh. I'm probably saying it far too much, but that is out of the pure joy of just saying the word. I’m sorry.
Is there a piece of art – a book, a film, a piece of music – that has inspired you recently?
I just saw One Battle After Another, and that totally inspired me. All the qualities and possibilities for telling a story through that medium are in there. The bad thing is when TV or cinema almost just becomes talking heads: it may as well be a podcast or a radio show. But this was everything. It shows what you can do with images. And the actors were amazing as well. It was so wild.
How do you relax?
I have a little cabin in the countryside and I've become a gardener. I did not bloody know that I enjoyed that kind of thing. Because I always grew up in gardens when I was a kid, and I thought when I left for the city I put all that behind me. But during Covid, we got ourselves this place and I bloody love it there. I go and dig a little hole and put a plant in or take something out, and I did not know the kind of calm that that could bring to you. Because once a plant is in there, it just does its own thing and you can't really tell it what to do. You just have to accept it. And I think that's kind of nice because I always want to control everything, and some things you just can't.
Interview by Guy Lodge
The Great Arch screens as part of the French Film Festival in London on 12 and 22 November. Details of screenings outside of London are here