Sidse Babett Knudsen on Electric Dreams, Westworld and Borgen

How’s this for a lip-smacking cast: Boardwalk Empire’s Steve Buscemi, Hunderby author and actor Julia Davis and Sidse Babett Knudsen, the Prime Minister in Borgen? It’s the latest deliciously eclectic ensemble in Electric Dreams, Channel 4’s ongoing anthology of adaptations of short stories by American writer Philip K Dick – whose post-apocalyptic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (the sequel, Bladerunner 2049, is released next month) and whose 1962 alt-history story The Man in The High Castle has been turned into a hit Amazon TV drama.

Dick, who died in 1982 aged just 53, is having a posthumous moment.

In the episode ‘Crazy Diamond’, inspired by Dick’s story The Sales Pitch, Buscemi plays Ed Morris, “as average a man as ever there was”, whose life is turned upside down when approached by a synthetic woman with an illegal plan. Knudsen plays that synthetic woman, Jill. “She’s a replicant, a robot ... but created from stem cells, human flesh, and with human emotions,” explains the actor, who rose to international fame playing the fictional Danish Prime Minister, Birgitte Nyborg, in three seasons of the political drama Borgen.

“Jill is failing; her extinction date is coming up and she’s deteriorating. She’s starting to bleed out of her eyes, and basically she gets Ed to do a heist with her, to steal these little lightbulb-looking animals or spirits or souls so that she can survive. So that’s the plot.”

For the 48-year-old Knudsen, who has since cemented her international ranking with a starring role in HBO’s Westworld, the casting of Steve Buscemi was a large part of the attraction of ‘Crazy Diamond’, which was filmed in London and Dorset.

“Steve has that unique sense of tragi-comedy, almost at the same moment,” says Knudsen. “It was such fun to play with him because he allows you to throw in some quirky suggestions – because you don’t feel silly.”

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SHe adds: “I’ve read very little Philip K Dick, but it seems that he sympathises very much with the non-human beings,” she says. “In ‘Westworld’, too, you felt for the robots.”

Ah yes, Westworld. Overlooked in this year’s Emmy awards, but a big ratings hit for HBO, the show featured Knudsen on the other side of the human-android divide: playing Theresa Cullen, the cowboy theme-park’s operations manager.

Cullen had begun to suspect that the park’s creator and presiding genius, Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins), of harbouring dangerously godlike ambitions. On Ford’s orders, she was murdered by her lover, software programmer Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), moments after Lowe was revealed to be an android.

The climactic scene between Knudsen and Hopkins is a masterclass, both actors perfectly still and playing it with their eyes. “I was completely high after that scene when he ultimately kills me... it was fantastic”, says Knudsen. “He really is the greatest –very generous, very musical, great contact. And of course he was a lovely man... exceptional. I met him and immediately we started talking about important things. He doesn’t mess around with small talk.”

One of the things they discussed was the whole subject of Artificial Intelligence – dramas about robots, from Westworld and ‘Crazy Diamond’ to Channel 4’s Humans and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina are very much in vogue – “All these questions about what makes us human, and what can we replicate.”

She admits that she herself is something of a technophobe: not a big internet user, much less social media.

“I’m shamefully old-fashioned, but I’m not going to continue,” she says. “I will get into this world very soon, but for now I’m not.”

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She certainly hasn’t read any reviews or online feedback about Westworld. If she had, she might be aware of one strain of controversy that concerns the show’s use of sexualised violence against women. One commentator, discussing both Westworld and Game of Thrones, called it “HBO’s brutality fetishism”.

“You’re the first to tell me because I haven’t followed up the reactions to the show,” she says. “I definitely didn’t feel like that when I was there, but isn’t it kind of the HBO trademark... that it’s quite out there?

“I don’t know. I wasn’t disturbed by it when I saw it. I thought that there are quite a few men being exploited in bad ways – but maybe not as much. Now that you mention it, I’ll think about it... for next time we talk. I’ll have an opinion by then.”

Knudsen’s Westworld character certainly didn’t endure sexualised violence, or any of HBO’s characteristic female nudity – in fact, she never allows herself go naked in any of her work.

That doesn’t stop her performing more outre roles, such as in Peter Strickland’s extraordinary 2014 movie The Duke of Burgundy, about a sadomasochistic lesbian relationship in which Knudsen’s character urinates on her lover.

And her aversion to Facebook also speaks to Knudsen’s dedication to personal privacy. She has never once revealed the name of her teenage son, or his father, or whether she is still in a relationship with him. “I never talk about it,” she reiterates now.

She does discuss her own childhood as the daughter of a photographer and teacher (“bohemians,” she calls them) who met on a boat to South America, and who parked the young Knudsen in a local school when they did volunteer work in Africa in the Seventies.

“I went to an English school in Tanzania for two years, from five to seven,” she says, explaining when she first picked up English. “And then I was put into the international school when we returned to Copenhagen.”

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She also speaks fluent French, having taken herself off, aged 18, to Paris, “just for a year, to be bohemian”, she says. “I thought I’d invent myself.” She ended up staying for six years, studying at Lecoq theatre school, which is famous for its physical performance and mime.

“Sidse Babett’s years at Lecoq were formative,” says Lars Mikkelsen (The Killing, House of Cards), an old friend of Knudsen from Copenhagen who has a similar grounding in physical theatre and mime. “She did a lot of improvisation, and her sense of realistic presence is unsurpassed in my view.”

Knudsen returned to Denmark to act in the theatre, coming to prominence domestically at the age of 29 in the improvised 1997 comedy Let’s Get Lost. One Danish critic noted her “special ability to capture the modern woman’s uncertainty and strength”.

She has made two acclaimed movies with director Susanne Bier (including the Oscar-nominated 2006 film After the Wedding), and held the role later played by Nicole Kidman in Lars von Trier’s Dogville: the Pilot.

But it was Borgen that made her name internationally. The last time I spoke to her, Knudsen said that she was missing her part as Birgitte Nyborg, but now she feels the character is definitely over.

“Sometimes I miss the process, because it was so exceptional to be constantly going into depth that way”, she says. “But the more I think about it, the more I think that story has been told. I think we’ve done Birgitte now.”

Did playing the Prime Minister make it harder to accept less fully-realised female characters: the supporting ‘wife roles’ that so many dramas seem to require? “No, because I was always difficult,” she replies, laughing. “I don’t have this book of characters that I want to play; it’s just when I see it on the page and I recognise something that thrills me. But it isn’t some sort of political correctness.”

Her next two films couldn’t be more different from Westworld – or indeed the two movies she made with Tom Hanks: Hologram for a King and Ron Howard’s Da Vinci Code follow-up, Inferno.

La Fille de Brest is “a sort of French Erin Brockovich”, she explains. “It’s a real political story, and what really interested me was the character because she’s really exceptional – a brilliant doctor, a bulldozer, a fighter, and she’s a clown at the same time. That combination of being super emotional and super hard, I couldn’t have dreamt of a better part when I saw it.”

Knudsen made her name in Denmark in comedy dramas. Does she hanker for more humorous projects now? “Oh absolutely, absolutely. I really miss that,” she says. “I’m so grateful when I see a good comedy.”

So then what is Ikite – a film I see that she has just completed filming in Finland? Is there room here for her more clownish tendencies?

“It’s a historical piece based on a couple of true stories, about this Finnish immigrant who went to America and was then called back by Stalin to come and create a new utopian paradise in Russia, on the border with Finland,” she says. “So, no, it’s a tragedy! It’s horrible, and then it gets more horrible and then it ends really badly...”

The ‘Crazy Diamond’ episode of ‘Electric Dreams’ will air on Channel 4, 15 October at 9pm