Actor Sonja Richter has Princess Mary’s Royal Danish seal of approval

SONJA Richter’s role of a high-profile kidnapped politician required the 40-year-old actor to spend three weeks in a pressure chamber.

Sonja Richter and Mikkel Boe Følsgaard in KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES danish film

Just a few days ago Sonja Richter, one of Denmark’s most acclaimed actors, was outside her Copenhagen home when a passing car stopped and the occupants shouted out hello.

The friendly neighbours in the historical innercity district were Crown Prince Frederick and his Australian-born wife, Crown Princess Mary, who live in nearby Amalienborg Palace.

“She (Mary) is an amazing girl,’’ Richter says. “I’ve got to know them and they are great and lovely people. I saw her (Mary) the other day. I saw the back of this super locked-up car passing my street, then the window wound down and I heard her yell, Hi Sonja.’’

Richter first met the royal couple after winning The Crown Prince Couple’s Culture Award in 2007. She has seen the couple at function many times since.

“Winning was unbelievable and a shock. It’s the biggest award for culture you can win here in Denmark,’’ she says. “The motivation for the prize is people or projects that are believed to have international potential. I felt so happy my work had been noticed. Since then I’ve felt I’ve wanted to give something back for such a great honour.’’

Richter is certainly attracting international attention for her recent film roles. She has just finished her first Hollywood movie, starring alongside Meryl Streep in Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman, and she also stars in acclaimed Danish thriller, The Keeper of Lost Causes, based on author Jussi Adler-Olson’s bestseller, which opens in Australia this week.

The role of high-profile kidnapped politician Merete Lynggaard is one of the most challenging of Richter’s career, requiring the 40-year-old actor to spend three weeks in a pressure chamber.

Richter also had to gain 6kg before filming started, with her kidnapping shown in flashbacks, then lose 8kg for the pressure-chamber scenes — to control her environment, including her oxygen intake — that were shot in the final weeks of filming.

“I gained some weight when we started shooting the movie for my first scenes, then the crew went away and filmed other stuff for four weeks, and we ended up doing all the pressure-chamber scenes at the end. I had a girl who was helping me to lose weight. I’m a skinny person, anyway, with a high metabolism.

“So I went on a diet and did I a lot of really hard exercise and did not eat a lot of foods — just mainly fruit and vegetables and water. I was always hungry, for real. I was living Marete’s ordeal, which was exhausting.’’

Richter’s long days filming began with make-up at 3am, to make her look malnourished and beaten-up, before filming started at 6am. On top of that, for some of the shoot she was performing nightly in The Royal Danish Theatre production of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.

“One night I was so tired and hungry, which made me nervous, and I was still in that pressure-chamber mode, so the character in The Keeper was getting so much space inside my head. I started to feel lost and alone, so I asked all my cast members to hug me all the time so I could get back to reality,’’ says Richter, whose character has to pull out an abscessed tooth with pliers and without painkillers.

Richter says playing a hostage was also an emotional challenge because she was acting by herself. She also wanted the role so she could work with long-time friends, director Mikkel Norgaard and BAFTA-nominated screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel (who directed A Royal Affair and wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed original-language film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).

“I’ve known them since film school and Nikolaj has asked me many times to be in a movie, so when they asked me to do this I was finally free,’’ says Richter, whose has been in-demand on stage and screen since graduating from Odense Theatre’s Acting School in 1999.

“Nikolaj (Arcel) really knows what he is doing, but he was actually on unsafe ground because of the whole pressure-chamber situation. It was super exciting because we did a lot of experimenting and I really trusted the director (Norgaard) and he really trusted me.’’

To Danish police, Richter’s Lynggaard is assumed dead, in the belief she committed suicide by jumping off a ship. But chief detective Carl Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), and his assistant Assad (Lebanese-born Swedish actor Fares Fares), does not believe Lynggard is dead and reopens the five-year-old cold case when he is appointed to head up Department Q.

It is when Morck and Assad interview Lyngaard’s mentally disabled brother Uffe (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard, who played the king in A Royal Affair) that they start to piece together what has really happened to the politician — and started to hope she is still alive.

“I was inspired by the character of Merete Lynggard. She was full of light and hope for her survival. The kidnappers weren’t going to get the better of her. So I was inspired by her … in all that darkness she had a glowing nature.

“That’s what I loved about her and that is why I took the part,’’ Richter says. “This movie will also appeal to Nordic crime fans who enjoyed (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), especially because it’s more than a thriller.’’

Richter attended this year’s Cannes Film Festival for the debut of The Homesman, in which she plays one of three insane women (the others are Australian Miranda Otto and Meryl Streep’s daughter Grace Gummer) in the 19th century American western, expected to open in Australian cinemas towards the end of this year.

“I spent a lot of time with Miranda Otto and we became good friends,’’ Richter says. “It was amazing to act with Meryl Streep (who also stars in the film), but I knew her more as Grace’s mum than as an acting icon.’’

The Keeper of Lost Causes opens in cinemas on Thursday.

Originally published as Actor Sonja Richter has Princess Mary’s Royal Danish seal of approval