Long before Kristofer Hivju starred in Game of
Thrones, he was developing an identity-switch drama with writer and director
Kristoffer Metcalfe, a long-time friend. The pair tell DQ about bringing
Norwegian series Twin to the screen.
For the past six years, Norwegian actor Kristofer
Hivju has been better known as Tormund Giantsbane, the formidable Wildling
warrior who becomes a key ally of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones.
Following the climax of the HBO fantasy epic, which
concludes after eight seasons this weekend, fans of the series will get to see
much more of Hivju - twice as much, in fact - in his next show, identity-switch
drama Twin.
The story follows Erik and Adam, a pair of identical
twins, both played by Hivju, who live completely different lives. When surf bum
Erik falls into money trouble and becomes homeless, he seeks out his brother
for the first time in 15 years, leading to a row that ends when Adam´s wife,
Ingrid (Rebekka Nystabakk), accidentally kills her husband.
To avoid a murder investigation, Erik takes on Adam´s
identity, embedding himself with his brother´s family and their successful
business. But he soon finds pretending to be someone else is more difficult
than he first thought.
The series has been created by Hivju and lead
writer/director Kristoffer Metcalfe, who have known each other since they lived
together in Oslo in their early 20s. Four years ago, discussions between them
about their own lives, their identities and the choices they have made prompted
the idea behind the story.
“Ingrid is the one who is responsible for the death of
her husband. Instead of Erik wanting to do the identity switch, she forces him
to do it,” Metcalfe explains. “It was more interesting to work with these two
people who have done a very bad thing but are now doing this to be good. Erik
has to play his brother and clear up his old life because he now has an
opportunity for a new start. But Ingrid can also find herself and reflect on
the life she has been living, and understand that the marriage was horrible and
Adam had a lot of secrets.”
Events in the series play out across just one week,
heightening the intensity of the situation in which Erik and Ingrid find
themselves. And while one might expect a police investigation to be the biggest
obstacle the duo face, it turns out that relationships within the family pose
the main threat to their plot.
“The more people care about them, the more challenging
it gets, because what you really want when you´re hiding something is people
staying away,” Metcalfe says. “Where you get a lot of the comedy is from really
small tasks, like Erik taking his son to Kindergarten. That´s half of episode
five. Or dealing with your daughter who is struggling at school and suddenly
you´re meeting the school principal who is a bitch. Erik is discovering all
these everyday things that almost everyone else has in their lives.”
The story also focuses on why Erik and Adam came to
blows, and the love triangle involving the brothers and Ingrid that led to the
twins´ estrangement. “When you have this very strong premise, you can be quite
subtle in the way you deal with the backstory,” Metcalfe continues. “You don´t
have to be too explicit about it, and you can actually have it feed into the
story. The answers are not always clear when it comes to what really happened.”
Hivju says the idea of a twin brother replacing his
sibling was something that “haunted” the pair until they decided to commit the
time they needed to develop the story.
“We fell in love with Erik and this guy who hasn´t
taken responsibility for anything in his whole life and lives day to day,” the
actor says. “He´s a lovely guy but it´s like somehow he´s a child. Adam is
appears as a straight businessman, but he has his own secrets. It just felt
nice to take him out and put the other guy in and see the drama it created.
“Often, as an actor, you get an offer to play a role,
you play the role and you don´t know about the four or five years that have
happened before to create everything, pitch it and fund it. It has been a new
thing for me to be part of that process and, in some way, it´s the best way to
prepare. On my first day of shooting, I had been preparing for five years. So
it was fantastic. It was like when Sylvester Stallone did Rocky - he had
created his own role and he just did it.”
HBO supported Twin´s
development before Norwegian pubcaster NRK picked it up two years ago. The
series is due to air this autumn, having had its world premiere at Series Mania
in France in March. It is also being screened at the Cannes Film Festival this
Saturday.
Metcalfe wrote the show alongside Anne Elvedal and
Vegard Steiro Amundsen, who joined him to work out the story beats and
structure. Co-director Erica Calmeyer also joined the project early on to
complete episode rewrites and ensure the two directors were working from the
same page.
The process wasn´t quite as smooth as Metcalfe had
planned, however, with production having to be pushed back due to Hivju´s
commitments on Game of Thrones.
“For a long time, he died,” Metcalfe recalls of the
plan for Hivju´s character in the HBO mega hit. “We started pre-production,
then he called me and said, ‘I didn´t die,´ and we had to postpone everything.
It was quite nice moment when we could cut his beard.
“He flew straight from Belfast, where he had a million
zombies around him all the time, and came to the studio and the first assistant
director said, ‘OK, Hivju´s on set for his first day.´ He comes in and looks
around at the whole crew, looked at me and said, ‘Is this everybody?´ I said,
‘Yes, welcome home!´ We´re a small crew but it´s very specific. People have one
job and they are doing it extremely well. In some of the locations in the north
of Norway with tiny roads, you wouldn´t be able to have an American crew in
those areas. You need a small, flexible but very competent gang. It´s important
that my role is also creating a sense of being in a band on tour for nine
months.”
Filming took place in an area of northern Norway
called Lufoten, an archipelago that stretches out from the mainland into the
Norwegian Sea. Its history as a fishing area, coupled with its popularity as a
tourist destination that blends dramatic mountains, hidden beaches and jagged
coastlines, meant it offered the perfect visual background for the series,
which hails from Nordisk Film Production in coproduction with Storyline Nor.
International sales are handled by TrustNordisk.
“We have an extremely spectacular location, with very
dramatic mountains and ocean, but early on I said there would be no [filming
with] drones,” Metcalfe says. “We´re not showing nature, we´re using it as a
dramatic emphasiser surrounding the characters and building the universe from
there. Because of the urgency of the story, we tried to transport that into the
visuals, so it was important to have energy in the visual style. When the
camera relaxes, there´s a reason for it. The camera should be as stressed and
high-paced as the two characters dealing with this crisis.”
For scenes featuring both of the twins, the crew
decided not to use complicated (and expensive) visual effects to have Hivju
sharing the screen with himself. Instead, they filmed using a picture double,
who would stand with his back to camera while Hivju jumped in and out of
different costumes depending on which twin he was playing. An earpiece would
also relay to him previously recorded dialogue so he could act against the
rhythm of the words when he switched roles.
“It was confusing, I can´t say otherwise,” the actor
laughs.
The crew also opted to shoot fast and flexibly using
handheld cameras. “We didn´t want any fancy camera movements,” Hivju says. “We
just wanted to have a documentary style so we could improvise and be free to
explore the scenes while we were shooting. We changed the script all the time
and tried different stuff. We wanted the creative freedom to do whatever we
wanted and do it fast. Compared with other big productions I´ve done, it was
very nice to have that freedom. If something went wrong, we could just reshoot
it.”
Metcalfe praises NRK for its current approach to
drama, citing Twin and off-beat crime drama Magnus as examples of how it is willing to take creative risks.
“My experience with the Scandinavian TV market is
series where you have a crime and a young girl is found dead in a lake
somewhere in the north. You have two depressed detectives - one is an
alcoholic, the other is a woman with a father complex - and they start to
investigate. This has become our identity in TV. But in the last five years,
there has been a bolder approach.”
With Game of Thrones now coming to a close, Hivju says
he keen to do more writing, which is what gave him a route into acting in the
first place. “When I understood the nature of writing, it gave me the
possibility to improve the project I´m working on,” he says. “That didn´t
happen on Game of Thrones - I didn´t change a comma on that. But very often
it´s nice to have the ability to write your own lines or be a good dramatist so
you can understand that you´re telling a story, not just saying your lines. You
try to make the whole work.
“I´ll continue to write and look for great parts. Twin
has been a new perspective for me because we´ve been working on it for so long
and I really wanted to do it. It was a purely dramatic role and a lead so for
me, I´m very happy.”