Who Is That Insanely Attractive Danish Actor Going to the Oscars? Why, It’s Claes Bang, Of Course!

I don’t blame my husband for getting a little jealous after I told him I was going to interview Claes Bang. It had only been a week after we watched the Oscar-nominated film The Square together, in which Bang stars as Christian, a dapper chief curator of a contemporary art museum in Stockholm, and I wasn’t exactly doing a great job at hiding my newfound crush. “I wonder who makes those glasses—they look so good on him!” I said as the camera lovingly panned in on his angular jaw and sleek pair of red frames. “Of course, Claes Bang. Even his name is cool,” I sighed, peering at his IMDb page on my phone as the credits rolled. (Cue my husband’s eye roll.)

As it turns out, I’m not alone in my infatuation. Bang was the toast of the town at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where The Square won the Palme d’Or, and where judges Agnès Jaoui and Will Smith admitted to a crowd of journalists that they, too, had fallen in love with him. Soon after, a Twitter hashtag called #BangforBond began, openly plotting to push the up-until-now barely known Danish actor into 007’s tuxedos (and swim trunks). Even People magazine, not traditionally the place where you read about foreign film stars, has jumped on the Claes Bang bandwagon, last week publishing a breathless “Five Things to Know” feature on the newly knighted 50-year-old sex symbol. (Smart money’s on a “Sexiest Man Alive” cover in this man’s future.)

Which brings us to the point: How does it feel to be, at age 50, the “next big thing” in Hollywood? “It’s very, very amazing,” Bang says over the phone from Berlin, where he’s currently filming his next project. “As an actor, that’s what you want; you want people to be aware that you are there, so that they can actually use you in their films and in their plays.” Aside from swooning viewers (and interviewers), his performance in The Square also nabbed the kind of good attention that tends to shape long, lucrative careers; Bang admits he’s gotten a number of big scripts post-Cannes, not including the very big deal that is his role in the sequel to Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, in which he’ll star opposite The Crown’s Claire Foy. “I didn’t really know what to expect or anything,” Bang says, regarding the buzz. “When you do the film, you just do your lines. You’re not thinking about how is this going to land, or is it going to win in Cannes. Everything that has come with it has come with it.”

Bang, who has appeared in Danish films and on German television, always dreamed of heading out to Los Angeles for his big break. “I’ve always thought of trying to go there and conquering that market, but I just couldn’t . . . that seemed too big a task,” he admits, though he honed his English skills, just in case. (As luck would have it, his big Hollywood breakthrough is in a Swedish movie, in which he predominately speaks Danish.)

For those who haven’t yet seen The Square (and why haven’t you?), the movie is directed by Ruben Östlund, the Swedish director who made a name for himself in 2014 with Force Majeure, another winner at Cannes (for Jury Prize), a film in which a man quickly abandons his wife and children during an avalanche on their ski trip, only to realize it was a false alarm a few seconds later. The Square, set in the admittedly impenetrable world of contemporary art, deals with equally squirmy subject matter, namely, through a series of increasingly awkward social situations. “[Östlund’s] scenes are very engaging,” Bang explains. “You almost always ask yourself, ‘What would I do in that situation?’ ” In one scene, a man with Tourette’s syndrome keeps yelling obscenities at a woman leading an artist Q&A. In another, a pair of millennial marketers suggests a jaw-droppingly offensive social media campaign for the museum’s latest exhibition in an attempt at going viral. And then there’s the almost unwatchably squirm-inducing postcoital exchange between Christian and a journalist (Elisabeth Moss) over who’s going to throw away their recently used condom (turns out, he doesn’t quite trust her intentions as much as the situation might imply).

While the scene with Moss is beyond cringeworthy, there’s something about it that’s just awful enough to be true. “For some strange reason, everything that Ruben puts in his films has always happened to a friend of his,” Bang elucidates. Not everything: Östlund is famous for shooting multiple versions of the same scene, and for that particular one, they filmed various ways of fighting over the used prophylactic. “We did endless variations of that scene because we couldn’t stop laughing. In one, I win the condom. In another, the condom breaks. And in one, Ruben told me to eat it, and so then I ate it.”

At this year’s Golden Globes, Bang’s first, the actor found himself in a similar Östlundian dilemma after eating what at the moment seemed like a harmless gummy bear. “Terry Notary [one of the actors in The Square] brought with him some pot gummies,” he explains. “I might now and then smoke a little bit of weed, but I had two of those and all of sudden I couldn’t even walk! I couldn’t stand; I couldn’t talk to people. Someone had to stick me in a cab. The cab driver took me to the hotel and I was home by nine! I have no idea what I was thinking.”

As for what’s next for him, other than The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Bang is focusing on his side gig as an electro musician. “I’ve been doing it for like, I don’t know, 10 years now. It’s really something that I do when I’ve got time on my hands and sit down at the piano,” he says. “I actually just got signed with a Danish record label, and have a record coming out at the beginning of April.” Also on his upcoming agenda? A trip to Sunday’s Academy Awards, where he admits he’s a total rookie. “I have no idea about anything. I’m just really, really excited to be there representing a film that was nominated,” he says, before letting me know he won’t be eating any gummies this time around: “I might have a glass of white wine.”