Stalking and sexual assault in the hit series “Baby Reindeer” and cancer in the film “Let Go.” Josephine Bornebusch felt that the projects she worked on had increasingly heavy subject matter.
"It's just gotten darker and darker. These are topics that make you very anxious, and they're easy for me to write about because I'm an anxious person. But now I felt a longing to do something where you can just have fun," she says.
Knocking on doors farce
“The Storm,” which comes to Netflix on October 15, is reminiscent of a classic door-slamming farce. A party at Filip (Gustaf Skarsgård) and Caroline’s (Aliette Opheim) remote mountain farm goes awry after the chef accidentally mixes hallucinogenic mushrooms into the food. Things get wild in the big house, to say the least, and many people are hurt in the chaos.
"I wanted to see if you could do a farce in a luxury package. Dogs flying away, people tripping and hurting themselves and cutting their fingers off," she says, laughing.
The cast includes a long list of Swedish star actors: Filip Berg, Jonas Karlsson, Gizem Erdogan and Henrik Dorsin. Josephine Bornebusch got the idea after a party in northern Sweden where the guests were snowed in. She thought it was a dramatic event that could be turned into a comic script.
You have preconceived ideas about how people should react. And it turned out that when the facades cracked, the ones you might have thought would back down a bit were actually the ones on the front lines.
Not moving
Josephine Bornebusch is best known in Sweden as an actress, including in "Solsidan", but in recent years has become a sought-after director internationally. She has two new series in the works: "How to Kill Your Family" for Netflix and "The Husbands" for Apple TV. But that doesn't mean she plans to work mostly abroad in the future.
No, I would like to go home and work again. A dream is to be able to do both. But you don't really decide that yourself. At home I write and direct; when I'm abroad I mostly come in as a director," she explains.
And she's not planning to move to Hollywood for work.
No, that's not the idea. I think it's great to have a base at home, and my family is very rooted in Sweden.
45 years old. Had her breakthrough as a teenager in the TV series "Rederiet" (SVT). Has played Mickan in "Solsidan" (TV4) since it began in 2010 and directed the TV series "Älska mig" (Viaplay), in which she also played the lead role.
As a director, she has also worked on several episodes of the series "Baby Reindeer" and "Vladimir" (both Netflix) and "Bad Sisters" (Apple TV), as well as the films "Orca" (Viaplay) and "Let Go" (Netflix).
Other selected film roles: "The Railway Gang", "The Dog Trick", "Little Yellow Lemons", "The Raspberry Boat Refugee".
"The Storm" comes to Netflix on October 15.
