Dar Salim, Trine Dyrholm on Portraying Complex Characters With PTSD

Danish stars Dar Salim (Game of Thrones, The Covenant, Until We Fall) and Trine Dyrholm (The Girl With the Needle,Beginnings,Poison)took the time to speak about their latest projects at the29th editionof theTallinn Black Nights Film Festival(PÖFF) in Estonia on Sunday, addressing their characters with PTSD and more.

Salim stars in Christian Bonke’s Hercules Falling, which world premieres Sunday at the First Feature Competition program at Tallinn. He plays Youssef, whose war experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq linger. “After an almost fatal incident at home, he enrolls in a special facility to prepare for another battle: this time, to learn to control his anger. It’s not going to be easy,” reads a synopsis.

The film combines documentary and fiction elements as it takes the audience to the Danish island of Strynø. There, Anne-Line Ussing and her husband, Stuart Press – who was diagnosed with PTSD 10 years after serving in the Australian Army – run a voluntary retreat center for Danish soldiers. “In the company of war veterans, generous hosts and their children, Dar Salim, who won the best actor award for Until We Fallat PÖFF 2018, delivers a performance of brutal honesty and frank authenticity in this gripping drama, which is both painstakingly researched and extensively timely,” the festival website promises.

So, how is Hercules Falling different from other war and war veteran movies? “The main difference is that we use real veterans, and Youssef’s story is a combination of their stories,” the star explained at Tallinn on Sunday. “The script is a cocktail of real experiences. If I had had some actors with me, I’m sure we could have made a wonderful movie. But when you succeed in having real people being themselves in an environment where they feel comfortable, and they forget that we’re making the movie, and then the filmmakers around them, tell the story through them, the experience [is different]. When you watch the movie, I hope you will feel it just goes a layer deeper.”

Added Salim: “I can’t recreate what they do, but I can, as a sponge, take that energy and translate that story to the audience. … So, the use of real veterans in a real veterans center gives this movie a special layer.”

Meanwhile, Dyrholm, in the new seriesThe Danish Woman, stars as Ditte Jensen, who retires from the Danish Secret Service to live a quiet life in Reykjavik, Iceland. However, she can’t stop being the elite soldier and warrior she was trained to be. So, she decides to help her neighbors. The six-episode series comes from directorBenedikt Erlingsson(Woman at War,Of Horses and Men).

“She is a very brutal character, both because of her past, but also because she acts like an emperor,” Dyrholm shared at Tallinn on Sunday. “The director always always says, if you mix Napoleon, Pippi Longstocking, and Rambo, you have The Danish Woman. So that is kind of the show.”

Again, PTSD is a key factor. “She has been a soldier in all the wars where Denmark has participated, and there are some flashbacks,” Dyrholm said about her character. So, yeah, she has PTSD.”

How did she prepare for the role? “Sometimes, we have to do a lot of research, but basically it is trying to put on the character’s eyes and look at the world from their perspective. And that is a very, very special position to be in, because you have to lean into a lot of unknown material.”

She added: “Somehow, we have seen so much now of war and horrible stuff, and just to imagine these things is, if you then have another person’s story to dig into,” what gets you into a character. “It’s special work somehow to dig into these other people’s lives that we have actually no idea about how it is to be in, but we can imagine.”

Salim also shared: “I’m a product of war myself. My parents ran away from Iraq when I was one year old. It’s a refugee story. We ended up in Denmark when I was seven. PTSD is not a foreign thing for me, and at the end of the day, I think this is a movie about veterans and about PTSD, but you have to just go into it with an open mind and be curious, and actually go in and feel like the amateur between these professionals, because they are the veterans. So it’s about spending time learning their stories, listening.”

Added the star: “I think none of us are foreign to being hurt in life. It can be a very strong divorce. It can be something with children. It can be a health issue. Not all our dreams come true. And this movie is really about taking an extreme environment, with very masculine men, and showing what happens to these guys who take responsibility, and they cannot live up to their own image. They are broken. How do they get back to life? And you can translate that to everyone. And I certainly can recognize that feeling.”

Salim is very proud of Hercules Falling. “I can tell you that already now, for me, this movie has been a huge, huge success on a personal level and on many levels. It’s very hard today, with all the options we have for entertainment, to convince people to go and watch a movie about a guy who doesn’t feel so good. I still hope they do, because it’s a wonderful experience once you’re in that theater room, but it’s hard to get there.”

He added: “We’ve already had a lot of veteran viewings, and the amount of messages I’ve gotten which are so heartfelt from people who, for the first time, feel seen is very touching. We world moves on so fast. People almost get their news on Facebook. ‘We should get more arms. We should go to more wars.’ I’m not a politician. I’m not going to say what’s right or what’s wrong, but we have to remember that these people are actually stuck in that one or two deployments they were in, and they’re still suffering, and their families are still suffering, so they [must] feel seen. So, I think this movie is already doing a lot for the veteran environment in Denmark.”