#this is how will borgen flirts???

[krakenshipwreck]

I always hated playing against this guy. One of the first things he showed me when we first got here was a video of me taking a penalty on him in one of the conference championship games. I don't know how he still had it on his phone, but first time we met I'm pretty sure he showed me that video on his phone. I don't know how we're friends from it now.

--UMD alum Carson Soucy about SCSU alum Will Borgen

[rye-views]

Stuck in Love (2012) dir. Josh Boone. 7.4/10

Logan Lerman looks so young.

Mom and daughter look so similar.

I love the concept of a writer family. This was a favorite movie of mine in high school.

Love the cooking vibes and music.

Spoiler: [About Rusty Borgens having a crush on Kate in his English class. She has a boyfriend, Glen. Rusty’s sister, Samantha, talks about serious things to boys at parties, but concludes with just wanting to have sex without having to see each other afterwards. Their dad, Bill, peeps through his ex-wife’s, Erica’s window often. He’s a well known novelist while his wife left him for Martin, a younger and more muscular guy. Bill and Rusty prepare Thanksgiving dinner as Samantha comes home from college. They have a plate set for Mom in case she shows up even though it’s been 3 years. Samantha reveals that her book is being published and is congratulated until Bill learns that it’s a new book that he didn’t help edit. Rusty goes to his mom’s place afterwards to have another dinner. He gets stoned, so that he can eat easier. Samantha doesn’t join since she doesn’t talk to Mom. Rusty doesn’t like the way Martin talks about Bill as if he’s a loser. Samantha and Bill make up and she mentions to him to move on from mom. Samantha and Rusty smoke weed on the roof as he talks about his crush on Kate. Samantha talks about being a realist and avoiding love at all costs. Rusty reads his poem aloud in class and references an angel. Kate mentions to him after class that she liked it. Tricia Walcott, the family’s neighbor, visits Bill regularly to have sex even though she’s married and has children. Rusty sees Bill reading his journal and argues with him. Bill defends himself and says he noticed a line that could be the opening to a book. He tells him to go out and experience more. Rusty and his friend, Jason, go to a party and use weed to get in. Rusty looks for Kate and notices her doing coke in the restroom. He decides to leave after until Kate and Glen publicly fight. Glen pushes her to the ground and Rusty punches him. He and Jason take her and drive away. Samantha is at a concert and eyes the lead. Erica calls her, but she ignores the call. At the bar afterwards, Samantha goes to talk to the lead until she’s interrupted by the bass guitarist, Lou. He tells her it’s a bad idea and Samantha tells him that she can tell he’s flirting with her and she doesn’t do dating. He mentions being in her writing class, but she leaves him regardless. Rusty allows Kate to sleep over at his place. Erica shows up to Bill and talks of how Samantha doesn’t talk to her. He consoles her and she tells him to move on since Samantha blames her for him moping. Rusty tends to Kate’s wounds at his home and she meets Bill, who is nice and allows her to stay. Kate asks Rusty if the angel in his poem is her. They kiss. Samantha notices Lou in her class even though she’s never seen him before. Rusty and Kate date in school together now. Tricia talks to Bill about moving on. Samantha fails to get a guy at a bar and learns from Lou that the guy was a Mormon. She doesn’t want to talk to Lou, but he takes her to a diner. They talk about books and when he mentions his favorite book, she leaves because it’s her favorite book too. Kate comes to Rusty on Christmas and he has sex for the first time in his closet. Samantha notices Lou isn’t in class and finds his address. She goes and finds him reading to his sick mother. She talks to him and learns that his mom has a brain tumor. Samantha gets to know the mom. Bill bumps into Erica while Christmas shopping and talks with her. Erica mentions how she still thinks about them and wonders if she made the right choice. Samantha is going home tomorrow, but Lou is going to take her on a proper date when she comes back. She gives him her book in the meantime. Samantha and Bill burn cookies as Rusty gives the book, It, to Kate and she gives another gift to him too. Samantha and Lou go on their date and he asks her if this is really how she feels about love and marriage. She brings up being in high school and seeing her mom have sex with Martin and saying she didn’t care if Bill saw. Samantha and Lou talk about their favorite everythings in the car and she cries at one point. They kiss and go ice skating. Tricia helps Bill with his

dating profile. He goes on the date and looks into Erica’s window after. He puts his wedding ring on her window sill until he notices her reading his book. He takes the ring back and goes home. Rusty and Kate hang out with Erica and Martin. Kate looks for drugs in there home, but fails when she’s interrupted by Erica. At Samantha’s book launch, Lou is introduced to everyone. Samantha manages to get a drink for Kate even though she is underage. Erica shows up, but is scared of seeing Samantha. Lou invited Erica. Bill talks to the other writers of his philosophy in writing. Bill convinces Erica to go talk to Samantha since Samantha used to look up to her. Erica goes to get a book signed and is quickly dismissed by Samantha. Rusty tries to find Kate and when he learns that she had a drink, he brings up her drug problem. They talk to the bartender and they learn that she got more drinks and left with a guy named Gus. The family go to get her as Samantha leaves Lou and is upset at him for contacting Erica. The parents cover Kate with a blanket and put her into the car after Bill beats up Gus. Rusty cries and sleeps in the closet after. Samantha is reading with Bill after until Tricia shows up and Samantha mentions that she knows they are having sex. Jason and Rusty are at the convenience store after smoking and get beat up by Glen and some guy. Rusty gets a letter from Kate since she’s in rehab and she mentions having cried from the book he gave her. Bill talks to Rusty about how he’s been acting recently and grounds him when he retaliates. Samantha learns from Bill that he had cheated first and Erica had waited months for him. That’s why he waits now. Samantha gets upset because he just let her hate her. Samantha gets a call from Lou saying that his mom died. She goes to console him. They attend her funeral. Samantha goes and makes up with Erica. Rusty gets a call from Stephen King, who helped Rusty’s story get published since he received it from Samantha. Lou joins their Thanksgiving dinner this year as Erica shows up too. She talks to Bill and is allowed back. They learn of Rusty’s published story and are happy.]

[fysidsebabettknudsen]

The fictional Danish prime minister in Borgen may have had her detractors. However, nearly four years since Borgen was last shown on BBC Four, the actress Sidse Babett Knudsen’s thoroughly humane creation remains not only the best prime minister Denmark never had, but the ideal to which all robotic female politicians, from Hillary to Theresa, can but hopelessly aspire.

Yet in Crazy Diamond, a forthcoming episode of Electric Dreams, Channel 4’s free-translation of Philip K Dick short stories, Knudsen is cast as a genetically bred android. “The thing is,” she explains, “in this the robots, or whatever you call them, are more sensitive than the real human beings.”

A theme of the episode is the need to escape from the badgering of the state and commerce. When we meet I ask her what her exit routes are. “I run and I swim.” In a swimming pool? “Or the sea, if I can possibly. In Denmark we’re Viking-ish. We’ll go out when everybody else thinks it’s freezing cold. And then I’ve just tried that thing called a ‘holiday’, which is that thing where you go away.”

She is back from three weeks’ scuba diving in Bali. Since this is clearly a rarity, I wonder if she found herself agreeing with the philosopher Alain de Botton that the problem with holidays is that you bring yourself on them. She looks completely mystified. “I don’t know what that means, or what relax means. My brain never sleeps. I want to take myself on holiday.”

So she still thinks about her life and her career when she’s away?

“Yes . . . but without interruptions.”

Knudsen is clearly driven, and no less so at 48 than at 18, when she arrived in Paris to train at the Théâtre de l’Ombre with barely a word of French. Her parents, Ebbe, a photographer, who died five years ago, and Susanne Andersen, a teacher, were bohemians not hippies, she says, but the family spent a couple of years in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. “If anything, they were explorers. They met in South America on a ship. If there’s one thing I’ve been brought up with, it is that we’re here to see what there is. It’s not about finding a good spot and then staying there.”

At drama school she was considered extremely “natural”, with a more direct route to her emotions than most of her French contemporaries. The praise at first puzzled her, until she won an insight into cerebral French education by giving English classes to children. “I saw these tiny children, mini, mini, mini human beings reciting Baudelaire they had no possible way of understanding.”

In Denmark, rather than learn the great texts by rote, children are taught as individuals? “Used to be. I think it’s changing now because, like everywhere else, it has to be about results. It’s madness. We’re going to live longer lives now. Why do children have to find out so early what they want to do?”

She stayed in French theatre for six years and then returned to Copenhagen, where she quickly won awards for her work on film before she was persuaded, partly by seeing The Killing’s Sofie Grabol in a series, that television was not beneath her dignity. Still, in 2010 she was far from convinced that Borgen, centred so firmly on the corridors of political power, would work in Denmark, let alone become an international hit. “I hope you don’t ask me why it did travel because I still don’t know.” It is probably because of her, I say. “Let it be recorded I said nothing to that.”

Uncannily, Knudsen’s Birgitte prefigured by barely a year the election of Denmark’s first female prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt. I wonder if Knudsen thinks that the show helped to establish the credibility of female politicians. Britain now has its second woman PM, but journalists have recently become fixated on her fashion choices. Knudsen sighs. Has the feminist battle not been won? “It’s an ongoing thing. I’m a feminist in that I believe in equality. I’m not talking about us being alike. I’m talking about being equals. Men and women in the same room is the best recipe.”

Despite her fears, Borgen turned out to be, as she puts it, her “passport to the outer world”. Her most recent international recognition has been for another robot sci-fi satire, Westworld, in which she played the conniving corporate employee Theresa. The scale, she says, was so much greater than for Borgen. Whereas on Borgen the cast would meet to discuss the plot, she had little grasp on Westworld’s wider storyline. Although this was an expensive project for the American TV network HBO, the pressure was less for her.

One low reason to watch this highly intelligent series was the amount of nudity on show. “The set was very much glass. You could see all these rooms with all these naked people.” Yet prurient viewers hoping to see a little more of Knudsen would be disappointed. She has never taken her clothes off for a role. “Because that’s private and it’s me. Even though it’s a part, it will be my skin. I’m not a fan of nudity as a spectator, and I don’t really like sex scenes. I like sexual, and I like the flirt and I want them to go into the bedroom, but I don’t want to see it. And I know if I’m watching something I’m going to think, ‘Oh, her thighs look like that.’ I don’t want people to come out of the cinema and think, ‘So that’s how she really looks!’ ”

Yet in the extraordinary 2014 movie The Duke of Burgundy, which is about two lesbians in a sado-masochistic relationship, she actually urinated on her lover. No, her character did, she corrects me. “I don’t think I could wee on cue.” She thinks — and critics agreed — it was a telling story about relationships, and, anyway, she remained dressed.

In a way, acting is a paradoxical profession for Knudsen. She is veryextremely private, has never told the press who the father of her 12-year-old son is or whether she is still — or was ever — with him. In a television interview with the Scottish first minister she told Nicola Sturgeon that she could not understand politicians’ desire to take centre stage and expose themselves to criticism. Yet, surely, this is exactly what she does as an actress.

“On the contrary. I’m hiding myself actively. There is a big difference between standing up and saying my name and then something as myself. That’s really scary.”

Knudsen has always said that she never sees people she plays as men or women, but as individuals. It is probably why for a long time this Dane said her ambition was to play Hamlet. I wonder if it still is. “I am thinking more of Richard III now,” she says. And wouldn’t that be something? Electric Dreams starts on Channel 4 tomorrow at 9pm with the first episode,The Hood Maker

Sidse’s perfect weekend

London or Copenhagen? I’m home-grown, so Copenhagen, but I love London as well

Wine or water? Water. I don’t drink now. I don’t enjoy it very much

Free-range parenting or tiger mother? Tiger mother, I think

Festival camping or five-star hotel? Five-star hotel

Hygge or hullaballoo? We can’t talk about that because hygge has gone completely wrong. It’s been misunderstood and I’d need an hour to explain

I could not get through the weekend without . . . Strawberry cake, dancing and lots of sleep