In the movie William Tell, Claes Bang plays the crossbow-wielding, apple-impaling hero of Swiss folklore. Which might be surprising to anyone who has followed the Danish actor’s career. Especially because, since his breakthrough role as an art gallery boss in Ruben Östlund’s 2017 Palme d’Or-winning The Square, Bang has tended towards villains rather than heroes.
He’s been Dracula in the 2020 BBC/Netflix revival, the evil chieftain Fjölnir the Brotherless in The Northman, and the despicable John Paul Williams in the first season of acclaimed Irish black comedy Bad Sisters.
He’s most recognised for John Paul – even in the cafes and shops of the Matakana Coast, from where he talked to the Listener before Christmas. He was in the area filming the Jason Momoa-Dave Bautista action flick The Wrecking Crew, and stayed on with wife Lis, touring the north before heading to the London premiere of William Tell in early January.
John Paul got his just deserts in the series written and starring Sharon Horgan – after all, the first episode titled “The Prick” begins with his funeral before it recounts how he abused his wife and terrorised his four sisters-in-law. But the character has followed him around ever since.
“I don’t think I have ever done anything that has had that kind of impact. It sometimes happens that people recognise me somewhere and if they recognise me for that, it’s a palpable disgust.
“I really have to assure them that I’m not like that because it seems that it really wrenched the guts of a lot of people watching that.
“The really interesting thing is that some people wrote to me to say, ‘Thank you for doing this, because there are so many of these men out there and I know one, or I have been married to one, or I have escaped one, or my sister is with one.’
“There must have been some kind of truth to it, or something that really struck a nerve … so that felt meaningful.”
The role in the Apple TV+ series is one of the many English-language roles that have come his way since The Square and his performance as Christian. Christian was the high-minded curator of a major contemporary Stockholm gallery whose life and career unravels after the theft of his phone, a fling with Elisabeth Moss’s visiting journalist and a marketing campaign for a new exhibition that goes viral for all the wrong reasons.
The film’s success meant that after 25 years of acting mainly on Danish and German television, the now 57-year-old found himself in demand further afield.
“It was a door-opener. I had the feeling that they took whatever it is I’m selling and put it at that spot in the supermarket where everybody sees it.
“And I got super greedy, because all these offers are coming in and I just wanted to do all of them – the train’s leaving the station, so bloody get on it because it’s a very capricious business, this. You’re flavour of the month, and next month you’re gone, right? So, I just thought, ‘Okay, now I’ve got wind in my sails, I’m just going to go with it.’”
Among the scripts to come his way was William Tell, British director Nick Hamm’s take on the legendary bowman’s role in the foundation of what would become Switzerland in the 14th century after vanquishing the cruel Habsburg Empire. This Tell is given a back story of having fought in the Crusades, so is a battle-weary, reluctant warrior with a wife he’s brought back from the Middle East.
Hamm’s script tapped the 1804 Friedrich Schiller play William Tell, which inspired the Rossini opera with its famous overture, though the resulting film is more an alpine-meadow Braveheart.
Bang had his own career reasons for taking on the role. “I will be honest and say I really felt that in order not to get boxed in that villain corner, I really felt I needed to do a hero-something.”
He knew of Tell and his most famous feat, but had a lot to learn.
“I obviously knew the legend, but I didn’t actually know why he was shooting an apple off his son’s head. This is horrible to admit, but I had an idea he was like a part of a travelling circus, and he was shooting an apple for money, for entertainment or something.”
Finding the bigger history of Tell as a freedom fighter made Bang more interested in taking on the role. “I didn’t approach it as a big action thing. I was very much interested in the whole journey of the character and that whole thing of him being forced to take a stand in that situation. So that is where I started.
“Then my wife read the script and said, ‘My Lord, this is a massive action movie’ and I said, ‘No, it’s not. This is a very existential story about a guy who’s seen war and does not want to go back there.’
“She said, ‘I think you need to read the script again.’
“I did and I thought, ‘Okay, fuck, I probably need to get into shape for this.’”
There was one slight problem with his preparations for the role. Crossbows are illegal in Denmark so he had to go to England to train. It wasn’t all fruit target practice. “It was much more about familiarising yourself with that weapon that is almost like an extension of his arm, because that is part of the legend ‒ that he was the master archer. It just had to look like he’d done this forever.”
Bang, which is pronounced “Bung”, speaks with an English accent that might make you think he grew up in London rather than various parts of Denmark, where, after attending drama school, he began his parallel theatre and screen career in the late 1990s.
As well as speaking English and Danish, he is fluent in Swedish and German and has acted in all of them. When he’s appearing on German versions of his English-language films, he overdubs his own voice when he can.
“The voice of an actor is such a pivotal part of the instrument. So, to take the language and the voice away – I don’t know if it ruins the piece, but it really distorts it.”
By the sound of it, he also knows well one forgotten dialect – that of 1980s electro pop. He’s released four albums-worth of music under the moniker This is Not America. It’s a solo project, a creative pursuit that doesn’t require anyone else.
“It’s a little bit of therapy for me and it’s also the antidote to what I do in my day job because my work as an actor is always something that involves a shitload of people.”
Yes, his acting profile has won his musical side some attention. “It was quite palpable that when I did Dracula, a lot of the Goth community really liked the show and they went and listened to the music, and it was quite obvious that they were very disappointed. Because it’s really poppy … you can totally tell that I’ve been listening far too much to Human League and Depeche Mode and New Order.”
William Tell is in cinemas from February 27.
