No one does career-inflicted family collapse like our favourite Scandi TV dramas. Our latest obsession is The Bridge’s Saga Norén, whose focus on the job is so all-encompassing that she has no lasting out-of-work relationships at all.
“It’s much more common here in Sweden for women to do that [obsess about work] than in England,” explains Sofia Helin, 40, who plays the Asperger’s-afflicted detective in the Danish-Swedish co-production. “But for her it’s an escape and it’s her life. She has very few interests apart from her work.”
Sofia can sympathise. “Right now, I’m going into a new part, and I can feel how I cut everything away: I don’t want to meet friends, I don’t want to do anything extra with the kids. It’s like everything around gets unfocused and I can only see this part that I’m going to do.
“When you’re a mother, everything is about taking care of others, and listening to other people’s and the children’s needs. And that’s what I want to do, but it’s hard when I’m going into a role.”
Sofia makes it up to her two children and her husband by taking two-month breaks between projects when she concentrates on being a mother, but others aren’t so lucky.
“We have a very good welfare system, with kindergarten for the kids, but I still see all my friends almost falling apart and having a bad conscience for not picking them up from kindergarten early enough,” she says.
Sofia is married to an actor-turned-church minister (“He wanted something more,” she explains). But she nonetheless has an admiration for the no-nonsense way her character picks up sexual partners in clubs.
“I didn’t think it was so shocking,” she laughs. “The shocking thing is that a woman does this, isn’t it? I think it’s a very rational and practical way of getting her needs fulfilled. Why not? You have to eat and drink and have sex and sleep. It’s not very common that you don’t have sexual needs in you.”
For Saga, everything is practical like this, down to her leather trousers, which she wears throughout the series. “Leather trousers are warm and they resist everything, so I think she thinks of them as just a practical pair of trousers,” she says.
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The 12-hour days Sofia worked when filming The Bridge took their toll, and she says she had some sort of nervous collapse when it finished. (It didn’t help that there was a real-life serial killer on the loose in Malmö at the same time.)
“I always get this kind of crisis after I do something,” she says. “I think it’s because I go into it so deep and hard, so when I have to let it go afterwards, I have problems.”
It’s especially difficult for her family.
“Going from being an actor to being a mother is a very big step, and it’s always painful to go back and forth,” she says.
But Sofia doesn’t accept that the pressures of balancing life and work is any argument for women to stay home with the kids.
“Don’t you have many sad at women home not working?” she asks. “They must be so understimulated and bored. Isn’t that a problem in England?”
The Bridge is on BBC4 at 9pm on Saturdays.
