2 days Ago By Stephanie Bunbury
Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Claes Bang was 50 when Ruben Ostlund’s The Square won the Palme D’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. He had been acting since he was at high school on the island of Funen, west of Copenhagen, and had a good working career on home turf, but his starring role as the narcissistic curator of a modern art gallery thrust him on to the world stage.
The Danish discovery was handsome, debonair, subtly dangerous. He spoke English. He spoke German.
His resemblance to Pierce Brosnan was noted. Could he be the next James Bond? Not at his age, as he pointed out. Nevertheless, Claes Bang was undeniably a star.
Bang is speaking to me from New Zealand, where he has just shot a buddy cop movie called The Wrecking Crew for Amazon and MGM; he is reticent about his own role but, given Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista play the cop duo, he is presumably a sinister European baddie. He has played quite a few of those. “I’m assuming they see a dark thing, right?” he said recently, when asked about his strong line in villains.
“There have been quite a lot of those nasty ones. I honestly don’t know [why], because I think I’m quite nice.” So it was reassuring, he says, to be asked to play Swiss folk hero William Tell.
Everyone knows one thing about Tell: he managed to shoot an apple off the top of his son’s head. The story is traditionally set in 1307, when Switzerland was ruled by the Austrian Hapsburg monarchy; Tell had been arrested for refusing to bow to the governor’s hat mounted on a pole. If he refused to shoot the apple, an entire village would be exterminated.
His skill with the deadly crossbow was well known; at the urging of his courageous son, he took his chance. There is no evidence that William Tell actually existed, but the story celebrates a good peasant’s patriotic spirit and steady nerve. Nick Hamm’s film draws on an 1804 play written by Friedrich Schiller, a political liberal as well as a giant of German letters.
Both Schiller and Hamm portray the Austrians as brutal and bloodthirsty; the Austrian king Albrecht (Ben Kingsley) is manipulative and half mad, while his local enforcer, Governor Gessler (Connor Swindells), is a sadistic thug. Bang says he still “can’t get his head around” the father who puts his son’s life at risk, even at gunpoint. “But when I started to find out that it was the centrepiece of this freedom story, a story of liberation, of standing up to your aggressor, that’s when it became really interesting.
” He was also drawn to the idea of a flawed hero; at one point, he wonders if William Tell is a hero at all. Hamm envisaged Tell as a veteran of the Crusades who has returned to Switzerland with an Arabic wife, Suna (Golshifteh Farahani), he rescued in Jerusalem. They have settled in the mountains, raised a son and turned their backs on conflict and bloodshed.
As their Austrian overlords become more monstrous, Tell resists the call to rebellion. A rebellion may well turn into a massacre, he reasons. He is also afraid of himself.
He knows what he becomes in battle: a monster lurks within. Claes Bang and Golshifteh Farahani in William Tell. “I like that there are these darker elements.
Elements of doubt, where a character sees a side of himself he doesn’t want to know about,” says Bang. “That gives you a lot more to play with than your straight shooter.” What he likes are the grey zones, where heroes have faults and villains believe themselves to be in the right.
Jean Paul, the manipulative bully hated by his wife’s sisters and eventually murdered by his long-suffering wife in Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters , “would probably say he’s a good person, looking out for his family”. Claes Bang with Anne-Marie Duff, who plays his long-suffering wife in Bad Sisters. The arrogant curator in The Square is “oblivious to the fact he’s a moron”, even when he turns into a kind of vigilante.
“I think it’s always very interesting when the characters have a very different perception of who they are and what comes across because then that gives me a lot of space to move as an actor,” says Bang. Even Dracula, whose die would seem to be irrevocably cast after 130 years of drinking the blood of innocents, was an ambivalent villain in the acclaimed BBC series with Bang as the count. “When they approached me, I thought: does the world really need another Dracula? But [creators] Mark [Gatiss] and Steven [Moffat] had done some really cool things with the character,” he said later.
“The thing about Dracula, I think, is that he doesn’t want to harm anyone. He’s not about that. It’s just a sad outcome.
He says what I really enjoy is a good conversation and a decent meal. The problem is that that will probably be the same person, but he just wants what we all want.” Claes Bang as Dracula: “He says what I really enjoy is a good conversation and a decent meal.
The problem is that that will probably be the same person.” At the same time, he realised Dracula had a more visceral allure he couldn’t explain. “People seem to be weirdly drawn to him.
There’s this whole thing of feeding off other people; I found out when I did it that there is something there that fascinates us. I probably even have it myself. You know what it’s like when sometimes you’re holding someone’s hand and thinking, ‘Grrr, what would it be like to take a big bite of that right now?’ I can sort of totally relate to that, not that I hope I would ever do it.
” William Tell is filmed in English. “I just did a movie before this one mainly in French, some English and a little bit of Danish,” Bang says. “That’s the first Danish I’ve spoken in 10 years.
I don’t ever work in my own language any more.” The film was L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche , about a Danish architect who won a competition to design a monument at La Defense in Paris. “I do not speak French, so I rehearsed the shit out of it, so I knew it all by heart,” Bang says.
It was fine, as long as nobody strayed from the script. “That kind of gave me an idea of how free I am in the languages I normally perform in, and I feel this freedom – especially in my own language, but I totally feel it in English as well. I think different languages sit differently in your mouth.
They bring out different kinds of physicality. And I think I have more sense of humour in English. I feel in my own language .
.. I don’t know, it’s a bit more serious.
And German feels more factual.” ’You know what it’s like when sometimes you’re holding someone’s hand and thinking, ‘Grrr, what would it be like to take a big bite of that?’ William Tell has its swashbuckling elements, even some Anglophone humour, but it is a film of more serious intent. “I would say that this is an anti-war movie,” Bang told The AU Review .
“We were very aware that when we were shooting this movie, the Ukraine conflict was already happening. And while we were shooting, the Hamas-Israel thing came on.” There was a gloomy sense that nothing has changed.
“I think we absolutely felt a massive responsibility to say something meaningful. To shoot this story and not be aware that this is going on in the world now, that would have been crazy. And I think we have tried our best.
” William Tell streams from March 12 on various platforms..
