Every Witch Way: Norwegian actress Ingrid Bolsø Berdal on Scandi drama Witch Hunt

If I had a tenner for every time I’ve said “Another foreign language must-watch from Walter Presents”, I’d be writing this poolside in Bermuda with a Strawberry Daiquiri to guard against dehydration rather than freezing my nadgers off in Dublin 1.

The latest Walter Iuzzolino discovery to be worthy of that billing is Witch Hunt, a financial whistle-blower drama that’s already taken its native Norway by storm.

Described by the great man himself as “a beautiful, taut and incredibly sophisticated piece of Scandi Noir”, it’s made an even bigger star there of Ingrid Bolsø Berdal who fans of HBO’s Westworld reboot will recognise as the snake tattooed Armistice. The 41-year-old’s best line during her two seasons of playing the replicant badass being, “The Gods are all pussies!”

Ingrid is at home near Oslo nursing her four-week old baby – congratulations! – when Hot Press Zooms her to find out why the show also known as Heksejakt is up there with Borgen, The Killing, The Bridge and The Lawyer in the bingeworthy stakes.

“I was presented with the project early on, so I got to read the drafts and talk to the main director about my character, Ida, who’s the chief financial officer in a big Oslo law firm,” she explains. “A lot of dramas have stories that are dragged in different directions, but this really focuses on what happens to her psychologically when she discovers that one of their biggest clients is involved in illegal money laundering, and instead of being thanked and backed by her bosses she’s made out to be the wrongdoer. How do we capture Ida’s fear and growing sense of paranoia when instead of there being a serial killer out there, it’s just normal people sitting in their offices? How do we make that really tense?”

The answer being: assemble a top-notch cast of actors who wring every drop of tension there is out of the script, which is given an almost Hitchcockian treatment. Among them are former Wisting man Mads Ousdal who plays the chief baddie, and Axel Boyum, another slippery eel colleague of Ida’s who starred in the Emmy award-winning Eyewitness and football drama, Home Ground.

“It really was a gift to work with these people and that script,” enthuses Ingrid who picked up the Scandinavian equivalent of an Emmy for her portrayal of Ida. “Five or six hundred thousand is a good viewing figure for a Norwegian drama – the population is five-and-a-half million – but Witch Hunt got double that when it went out on Sunday nights. There’s a political element too with the Justice Minister, played by Jaane Heltberg who was in Occupied, wanting to introduce new legislation that would make this sort of crime more difficult.”

Add in a dogged fraud squad cop and an equally determined investigative journalist, and the writers have a perfect cast of characters upon whom to hang their ingenious plot twists.

“It’s a very human drama based partly on real financial things that have happened in Norway, so when the surprises come – and there are lots of them! – they’re all believable,” she notes.

We tend to think of Scandinavia as being the one culturally homogenous lump, but of course its constituent countries are all very different. Asked where Norway sees itself in the Nordic scheme of things, Ingrid laughs and says, “I don’t have an in-depth analysis for you, but when it comes to film and TV and music, I think we regard ourselves as being a little brother to Denmark and Sweden. Take, say, pop culture. Swedish music is far more out there in the world, but Norway is catching up with people like Ingrid, Aurora and girl in red. We love the Swedes but they also irritate us a bit. When it comes to sport, and skiing in particular, there’s a big rivalry. When we go to Denmark on vacation we come back saying, ‘They’re so relaxed. They hang out in their parks and have their beers and nothing bothers them.’ Norwegians are a bit more cold-hearted and uptight.”

Ingrid came to acting relatively late having originally wanted to be a child psychologist and then a jazz singer.

“My parents are teachers and worked with special needs kids, so I’ve always been interested in human behaviour,” she explains. “At the same time, I also loved singing and playing and studied music in university. My plan was to go into the jazz side of things, but then I saw the curriculum for the drama school in Oslo. I’d done a couple of amateur shows before and loved it, so I applied to them at the same time as I applied to the conservatories and they accepted me. I was like, ‘I don’t know what it really involves, but I’ll give it a go.’”

Studies completed, Ingrid did a lot of theatre work before getting her big screen break in Cold Prey, a cult Norwegian slasher movie, which is awaiting an American remake.

“The biggest Norwegian film website posted yesterday on Instagram that it’s fifteen years since Cold Prey was released. I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re getting older!’ There was also a sequel that I was in and a third that’s other people. It taught me a lot about making movies and helped me to get noticed outside of Norway.”

Ingrid got her first taste of Hollywood in 2015 when she appeared alongside Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and John Hurt in the $250m-grossing Hercules. It was, she says, a steep learning curve.

“I got a Danish agent who works with casting directors in London and Los Angeles, so slowly I started to get auditions. I got really lucky and was cast as a warrior in Hercules, which was big budget and very different to shooting here in Norway. I was scared at first not wanting to make mistakes, but then I realised that messing up is part of the creative process. It just isn’t very easy when it’s in front of four hundred people!

“Before that,” she continues. “I’d done a smaIler movie, All At Sea, with Lauren Bacall – I didn’t have many scenes with her but she was lovely – and Brian Cox who was so kind and patient and helpful. I learned a lot from him.”

Her cinematic CV was positively bulging by the time she got the nod from Westworld showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Jay.

“I was sent a really great scene where the robots are going through different character modes, which is an actor’s dream,” she beams. “I loved the original film and was very, very happy when they said they wanted me on board. It was a great experience to see how these massive stars work with the script and each other. I expected the professionality but not necessarily the warmth. I made some good friends on that show like Angela Sarafyan who played Clementine; Rodrigo Santoro who was Hector Escaton; and Ptolemy Slocum who played Sylvester. I still wish I was on there with them!”

The silver lining being that Ingrid’s departure at the end of season two freed her up to do Witch Hunt and Stardust, a fantastical children’s show, which had its theme tune supplied by the aforementioned Aurora.

“I like being able to go between big budget American productions and Norwegian shows where there’s no CGI,” Ingrid concludes. “I got to shoot two films during the pandemic –one on an island in the middle of Norway where there was no Covid – so I’ve been very lucky.”

• The first episode of Witch Hunt airs on Channel 4 at midnight on Monday November 15, with the box-set available immediately afterwards from the Walter Presents strand of Channel4.com.