A theatre-trained Danish ensemble actor whose best screen work is done listening: as Philip Christensen in Borgen he makes a husband watching television carry as much weight as the speech it interrupts. Modest, exact, and worth looking for at the edge of the frame.
Fi1m perspective
Philip Christensen is on the sofa. His wife is on the television, at a debate she is not expected to win, and she has just put down her notes and started talking. Mikael Birkkjær does nothing in this shot that you could point to. He watches, with his son beside him, and you can see him work out what she has done and what it will cost the three of them. That is the job he is usually given, in Borgen (2010) and elsewhere: the man to one side, listening, whose face tells you the weight of what the person at the centre has just said.
He came to it from the theatre. He trained at the Skuespillerskolen at Odense Teater in 1985 and spent a long stretch at Det Kongelige Teater from 1990, and television found him late, with Sommer in 2008. Forbrydelsen followed in 2009, in which he plays the police inspector Ulrik Strange, a part we will say nothing more about; then Philip in Borgen, which he kept up across every series through to 2022; then Jonas in the final series of The Bridge in 2018. The parts are husbands, colleagues, policemen, the professional men who fill out Danish ensemble drama, and he has made a career of them.
Borgen is where he matters most, and it is the domestic half of that programme that shows why. Sidse Babett Knudsen's Birgitte Nyborg is the reason to watch, and the marriage is the reason to keep watching, because Birkkjær plays a decent man who has agreed to come second and is discovering, week by week, what that agreement means. We will not say how it goes. What we will say is that the cut to him at home in the first episode, before the plot has properly started, moved us more than the speech it interrupted, because the speech was about the country and he was already thinking about the three of them.
Jonas in The Bridge is a different animal: blunt, careless of what anyone thinks of him, a partner for Henrik in the last series. It is a smaller matter. Our review did not single him out, and rightly, because the programme is Sofia Helin's, and Jonas is there to make its final stretch a little coarser than what came before. Birkkjær does it without asking for credit.
The caveat is the obvious one. He is a Danish actor of the ensemble kind, and his reputation has stayed inside Danish and Scandinavian production; the international lead has not come and probably will not now. That is no loss to the work. If you want to know what he does, watch the first episode of Borgen, take your eye off Knudsen for a moment, and watch the man on the sofa.
Biography
Mikael Birkkjær is a Danish actor born in Copenhagen on 14 September 1958. He trained at the acting school of Odense Teater, graduating in 1985, and has been affiliated with the Royal Danish Theatre (Det Kongelige Teater) since 1990. He received the Lauritzen Prize in 1996.
Birkkjær is known internationally for his television roles, including Philip Christensen, the husband of the prime minister, in the political drama Borgen (2010–2022), and Inspector Ulrik Strange in Forbrydelsen (The Killing, 2009). He also appeared as Jonas Mandrup in the fourth season of The Bridge (2018). He has appeared in numerous Danish films and stage productions over a career spanning more than four decades.
