Pilou Asbæk: ​‘Today’s world lead­ers don’t have any answers’

You may not know the name but pret­ty soon Pilou Asbæk will be on everyone’s lips. While the 33-year-old Dan­ish actor has been qui­et­ly ply­ing his trade in his home­land for the past eight years, find­ing suc­cess with shows like Bor­gen and The Killing, 2016 looks set to be the year he makes it big.

First up is A War, his sec­ond col­lab­o­ra­tion with A Hijack­ing direc­tor Tobias Lind­holm, in which Asbæk plays a com­pa­ny leader accused of com­mit­ting a war crime while serv­ing in Afghanistan. Then there’s the small mat­ter of the sixth sea­son of Game of Thrones, which marks his first major role out­side of Den­mark. We sat down with Asbæk recent­ly to talk glob­al pol­i­tics and how it feels being poised for stardom.

LWLies: You’re orig­i­nal­ly from Copen­hagen. Do you still live there?

Asbæk: Oh yeah. There’s no need to move.

What do you love about your city?

It’s just so chilled. No one harass­es you, no one wants to take self­ies, it’s great! I live in Nør­re­bro, one of the tough­est neigh­bour­hoods, which is real­ly mul­ti­cul­tur­al. I real­ly love that.

What are your thoughts on the recent influx of immi­gra­tion to Den­mark and par­tic­u­lar­ly Copenhagen?

Peo­ple have been trav­el­ling for thou­sands of years, so I don’t real­ly know why we’re mak­ing a big fuss about it now. It’s not some­thing new. The cri­sis in Syr­ia is a world prob­lem, not just a Euro­pean prob­lem. We need to under­stand that war has con­se­quences and we need to relate to that and accept that. Right now there’s a cou­ple of mil­lion peo­ple, refugees, walk­ing through Europe – what are we going to do about it? I don’t want to be part of the gen­er­a­tion that said, ​‘No, you can’t enter.’

Den­mark was one of the first coun­tries to send troops to Afghanistan after ⁹⁄₁₁, which is a fact that per­haps not many peo­ple are aware of out­side of Denmark.

We put in a big effort in Afghanistan; we did the same thing in Iraq and Koso­vo. But the thing is, Afghanistan was the first war where we became a war­fare nation, where we were proac­tive. We were the third coun­try, after the US and UK, to sign up. It was a mas­sive argu­ment in the Dan­ish press 10 years ago, and the pop­u­lar opin­ion at the time was that it was a col­lab­o­ra­tion among world lead­ers. When you talk to peo­ple in the US and UK no one seems to know about Denmark’s involve­ment, and you think, ​‘why did we sign up for this, oth­er than for our Prime Min­is­ter to become pals with Blair and Bush?’

Pre­sum­ing the mood has changed, as it has in the UK, what do you think is the sig­nif­i­cance of a film like A War being released now?

It is inter­est­ing because the film doesn’t give any answers, and I don’t think the world lead­ers today have any answers. They don’t know what to do in Syr­ia. We don’t even know how to agree on a cli­mate issue… We were pret­ty naïve back in 2002, 2003 and I don’t think we’ve learned all that much about for­eign pol­i­cy. When our gov­ern­ment came out and admit­ted they made a mis­take by send­ing troops to Afghanistan, that real­ly affect­ed the Dan­ish people.

Did you have much inter­ac­tion with war vet­er­ans while con­duct­ing research for your role?

Quite a bit, I talked to a lot of sol­diers and the real­ly inter­est­ing thing was meet­ing the peo­ple, the hus­band, the father, the moth­er, the wife… I start­ed reflect­ing on this, because at the time I thought these pro­fes­sion­al sol­diers were the ene­my of the state, you know, this idea of going to a for­eign coun­try and killing in the name of democ­ra­cy just seemed crazy to me. And then sud­den­ly I hear all these life sto­ries and it total­ly changed my perspective.

Were there any com­mon themes that emerged from those conversations?

Yeah, they were frus­trat­ed. All of the sol­diers in the film are played by pro­fes­sion­al sol­diers, and have served in Koso­vo and Iraq and Afghanistan, so they’ve been there and under­stand the rules of war­fare. But the Tal­iban don’t fol­low the same rules, they fight to sur­vive. We’ve seen what hap­pens in war­fare with­out rules and reg­u­la­tions. So they were very frus­trat­ed that these rules of engage­ment which they had to fol­low seemed to change every day.

As a species, why do you think we’re so obsessed with war and conflict?

That’s such a British question.

How do you mean?

Well, in Den­mark I always get asked the same ques­tion: ​‘Are you pro war or anti war?’ In the UK you have a much more inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive on pol­i­tics and the ques­tions are so much more nuanced. I think it’s the Shake­speare in you guys. It sounds weird, but it’s the strug­gle for pow­er. I’m a mas­sive Game of Thrones fan, so to sud­den­ly be a part of it was like being 10 years old and going to Dis­ney­land, and I think what intrigues us is this idea of being in con­trol, being on top, being the one who’s call­ing the shots. That’s war, whether it’s for con­trol of land or oil or what­ev­er, that’s the essence of why we fight.

What can you tell us about your role in Game of Thrones?

I play Euron Greyjoy, which I’m only allowed to talk about because some­one leaked it. That was a crazy time. The day it got leaked, I was shoot­ing and when I got back to my hotel room I had 200 missed phone calls and twice as many emails, and I gen­uine­ly thought some­thing had hap­pen to one of my fam­i­ly mem­bers. Either my wife or my mum or my kid died, I was con­vinced. I mean, I knew the show was a big deal, but that was intense.

You know this is just the begin­ning, right?

Appar­ent­ly so. Already peo­ple are send­ing me all this fan art over Twit­ter. No one’s even seen the show yet! That’s when you know how mas­sive it is. But it was a lot of fun. I can’t wait for every­one to see it.

A War is released 8 January.