Sidse Babett Knudsen on Electric Dreams, Westworld and Borgen

How’s this for a lip-smacking cast: Boardwalk Empire’s Steve Buscemi, Hunderby author and actor Julia Davis and Sidse Babett Knudsen, the Prime Minister in Borgen? It’s the latest deliciously eclectic ensemble in Electric Dreams, Channel 4’s ongoing anthology of adaptations of short stories by Philip K Dick – the American writer whose post-apocalyptic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, inspired Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (and whose sequel, Bladerunner 2049, is released next month) and whose 1962 alt-history story The Man in The High Castle has been turned into a hit Amazon TV drama.

Dick, who died in 1982 aged just 53, is having a posthumous moment.

In Crazy Diamond, inspired by Dick’s story The Sales Pitch, Buscemi plays Ed Morris, “as average a man as ever there was”, whose life is turned upside down when approached by a synthetic woman with an illegal plan. Knudsen plays that synthetic woman, Jill. “She’s a replicant, a robot ... but created from stem cells, human flesh, and with human emotions,” explains the actor, who rose to international fame playing the fictional Danish Prime Minister, Birgitte Nyborg, in three seasons of the political drama Borgen.

“Jill is failing; her extinction date is coming up and she’s deteriorating. She’s starting to bleed out of her eyes, and basically she gets Ed to do a heist with her, to steal these little lightbulb-looking animals or spirits or souls so that she can survive. So that’s the plot.”

For the 48-year-old Knudsen, who has since cemented her international ranking with a starring role in HBO’s Westworld, the casting of Steve Buscemi was a large part of the attraction of Crazy Diamond, which was filmed in London and Dorset.

“Steve has that unique sense of tragi-comedy, almost at the same moment,” says Knudsen. “It was such fun to play with him because he allows you to throw in some quirky suggestions – because you don’t feel silly.”

SHe adds: “I’ve read very little Philip K Dick, but it seems that he sympathises very much with the non-human beings,” she says. “In ‘Westworld’, too, you felt for the robots.”

Ah yes, Westworld. Overlooked in this year’s Emmy awards, but a big ratings hit for HBO, the show featured Knudsen on the other side of the human-android divide: playing Theresa Cullen, the cowboy theme-park’s operations manager.

Cullen had begun to suspect that the park’s creator and presiding genius, Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins), of harbouring dangerously godlike ambitions. On Ford’s orders, she was murdered by her lover, software programmer Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), moments after Lowe had being revealed to be an android.

The climactic scene between Knudsen and Hopkins is a masterclass, both actors perfectly still and playing it with their eyes. “I was completely high after that scene where he ultimately kills me... it was fantastic”, says Knudsen. “He really is the greatest... very generous, very musical, great contact. And of course he was a lovely man... exceptional. I met him and immediately we started talking about important things... he doesn’t mess around being small talk.”

One of the things they discussed was the whole subject of artificial intelligence, dramas about robots, from Westworld and Crazy Diamond to Channel 4’s Humans and Alex Garland’s movie Ex Machina, being very much in vogue. “All these questions about what makes us human, and what can we replicate”, she says, admitting that she herself is something of a technophobe, not a big internet user and not touching social media. “I’m shamefully old fashioned but I’m not going to continue”, she says. “I will get into this world very soon but up to now I’m not.”

She certainly hasn’t read any reviews or online feedback about Westworld, otherwise she might be aware of one strain of controversy that concerns the show’s use of sexualised violence against women – what one commentator, discussing both Westworld and Game of Thrones, called “HBO’s brutality fetishism”.

“I’m not on the internet so much and you’re the first to tell me because I haven’t followed up the reactions to the show”, she says. “I definitely didn’t feel like that when I was there but isn’t it a kind of the HBO trademark... that it’s quite out there? I don’t know. I wasn’t disturbed by it when I saw it. I thought there quite a few men being exploited in bad ways – but maybe quite not that much. Now that you mention it, I’ll think about it... for next time we talk, I’ll have an opinion by then.”

Knudsen’s Westworld character certainly didn’t endure sexualised violence or any of HBO’s characteristic female nudity – in fact, she never allows herself go naked in any of her work. Not that that stops her performing other, more outre roles, as in Peter Strickland’s extraordinary 2014 movie The Duke of Burgundy, about a sadomasochistic lesbian relationship in which Knudsen’s character urinates on her lover.

And her aversion to Facebook also speaks of Knudsen’s dedication to personal privacy, never once having revealed the identity of the father of her unnamed teenage son or whether she is still in a relationship with him. “I never talk about it”, she reiterates now.

She will discuss her own childhood as the daughter of a photographer and teacher, “bohemians” who met on a boat to South America and who parked the young Knudsen in a local school when they did volunteer work in Africa in the 1970s. “I went to an English school in Tanzania for two years, from five to seven,” she says, explaining when she first picked up English. “And then I was put into the international school when we returned to Copenhagen.”

She also speaks fluent French, having taken herself off, aged 18, to Paris. “Just for a year, to be bohemian”, she says. “I thought I’d invent myself.” She ended up staying for six years, studying at Lecoq theatre school – famous for its physical performance and mime.

“Sidse Babett’s years at Lecoq were formative,” says Lars Mikkelsen (The Killing, House of Cards), who has a similar grounding in physical theatre and mime, and who is an old friend from Copenhagen. “She did a lot of improvisation, and her sense of realistic presence is unsurpassed in my view.”

Knudsen returned to Denmark from France to act in the theatre, finally coming to prominence domestically at the age of 29 in the improvised 1997 comedy Let’s Get Lost, one Danish critic noting her “special ability to capture the modern woman’s uncertainty and strength.” She has made two acclaimed movies with director Susanne Bier (including the Oscar-nominated 2006 film After the Wedding), and took the role later played by Nicole Kidman in Lars von Trier’s Dogville: the Pilot.

But it was Borgen that made her name internationally. The last time I spoke to her, Knudsen said that she was missing the part of Birgitte Nyborg, but now she feels the character is definitely over. “Sometimes I miss the process because it was so exceptional to be constantly going into depth that way”, she says. “But the more I think about it, the more I think that story has been told. I think we’ve done Birgitte now.”

Did playing the prime minister make it harder to accept less fully-realised female characters – the supporting ‘wife roles’ that so many dramas seem to require? “No, because I was always difficult”, she replies, laughing. “I don’t have this book of characters that I want to play, it’s just when I see it on the page and I recognise something that thrills me. But it isn’t some sort of political correctness.”

Her next two films couldn’t be more different from Westworld, or indeed the two movies she made with Tom Hanks, Hologram for a King and Ron Howard’s Da Vinci Code follow-up, Inferno. La Fille de Brest is “a sort of French Erin Brockovich”, she explains. “It’s a real political story and what really interested me was the character because she’s really exceptional – a brilliant doctor, a bulldozer, she’s a fighter, and she’s a clown at the same time. That combination of being super emotional and super hard, I couldn’t have dreamt of a better part when I saw it.”

Knudsen made her name in Denmark in comedy dramas. Does he hanker for more humorous projects now? “Oh absolutely, absolutely... I really miss that”, she says. “I’m so grateful when I see a good comedy.”

So what then is Ikite – a film I see that she has just completed filming in Finland? Is there room here for her more clownish tendencies? “It’s historical piece based on a couple of true stories about this Finnish immigrant who went to America and was then called back by Stalin to come and create a new utopia paradise in Russia on the border with Finland”, she says. “So, no, it’s a tragedy! It’s horrible, and then it gets more horrible and then it ends really badly...”

The ‘Crazy Diamond’ episode of ‘Electric Dreams’ is on Channel 4 on 15 October at 9pm.