Ólafur Darri Ólafsson

In Trapped (2015) the police chief Andri Ólafsson asks a suspect a question, waits, and asks it again. That is most of what Ólafur Darri Ólafsson does for ten episodes, and it is enough. He is a huge man who speaks slowly, wears the same knitted jumper through most of a murder inquiry and never raises his voice, and the series takes its pace from him, because a blizzard has shut the town and nothing can be hurried anyway. We have watched a great many television detectives lose their temper across a table. Watching one sit there until the other man filled the silence made us hold our breath, and we had not expected a police interview to do that again.

He came to the screen from the stage. He graduated from the Icelandic Drama School in 1998, worked with the National Theatre of Iceland and Reykjavík City Theatre, and co-founded the Vesturport company, where he first worked with Gísli Örn Garðarsson, who has written and acted alongside him several times since. The films that followed were small and Icelandic: Children (2006), which he co-wrote and led as Marinó, and The Deep (2012), a survival drama based on real events in which he plays Gulli and spends a good deal of the running time in cold water. Trapped changed the scale. Since it began in 2015 he has divided himself between Icelandic leads, among them The Minister (2020), and supporting parts in American film and television, most visibly as Mr Drummond in Severance (2022).

What works is the stillness, and he knows where it comes from. He built Andri on his father, of whom he said: "I've never seen him cry, and he rarely gives anything away – but he can use silence very effectively." The director who understands this best is Baltasar Kormákur, who made Trapped and has worked with him five times on screen. Kormákur holds a shot on a face that is doing nothing visible and lets the viewer do the work. He gives Andri a reason for the quiet and then leaves him alone with it.

What works less is what other people do with the stillness. Cast abroad, he is mostly asked to stand at the edge of the frame and be large and unreadable, and a face that does its work in silence needs a camera prepared to stay on it. American television rarely stays. The risk is plain: a man that size who says that little is easy to cast as a threat and harder to cast as anything else, and so far the English-language parts have taken the easy option.

Start with Trapped, at home, an episode a night in winter, and give him the time he gives everyone else. We are still waiting for a part outside Iceland that asks for it.