N°111 Kim Bodnia

Kim Bodnia is a Danish actor, writer, and director. He was born in Copenhagen but grew up in Espergærde, and he comes from a Jewish family with Polish and Russian ancestry. Bodnia did his acting training at the Copenhagen Theater School. He had a successful theatrical career as an actor before making his debut in 1994 in Nattevagten (Nightwatch), for which he won The Robert Award for best supporting actor. His breakthrough performance on the big screen as drug dealer Frank in Nicolas Winding Refn’s 1996 directorial debut Pusher helped him gain recognition on a global scale.

He has since been in a great deal of both television shows and movies. Notably, in 2010 he had a role in the Danish director Susanne Biers film Hævnen (In A Better World), and it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Then he starred in the 2012 successful film Love is All You Need alongside Trine Dyrholm and Pierce Brosnan.

In the first two seasons of the Nordic noir criminal television series Broen (The Bridge, 2011–2018), Bodnia portrayed the Danish detective, Martin Rohde. It has been screened in more than 100 countries around the world. Bodnia signed on for the third series, but he left because he was allegedly dissatisfied with how his character was growing. In an interview, he also expressed worries about working in Malmö because of the anti-Semitism issues in that city, which helped him decide to end the series, stating, “it’s not very nice and comfortable to be there as a Jewish person.”

Bodnias directing experience includes the short film Flugten fra ensomheden (Escape – Flight from loneliness), which was released in 2001. Early in 2014, he oversaw performances of The Tailor’s Tale, a play written by his cousin Alexander Bodin Saphir based on the experiences of his Jewish grandparents living in Copenhagen during the Nazi occupation, which was presented at the Scandinavia House-The Nordic Center in America in New York.

What he is perhaps best known for however is for playing the pragmatic and self-interested Konstantin Vasiliev in the popular show Killing Eve. The TV show has achieved enormous success all around the world and has garnered multiple awards, including Best TV series at the 2019 Critics’ Choice Awards and the Golden Globes. For this portrayal, Kim was nominated for a TV Bafta in the category of best supporting actor in 2019.

In his personal life, Bodnia lives in a house in a forest about 20 minutes out of Copenhagen, with his actress wife Rikke and four children – his son Louis, 20, from a previous relationship, and their three: Charlie, ten, Miles, eight, and Nomi, six.