Peter Stormare
Hometown: Arbra, Gavleborgs Lan, Sweden
Currently: Making his Broadway debut opposite Mary-Louise Parker as manipulative Judge Brack in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s edgy update on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.
Small-Town Boy: Before he became Hollywood’s go-to tough guy in movies like Fargo, Chocolat, Armageddon, Bad Boys II, Minority Report, The Lost World and Constantine and TV’s Prison Break, Stormare was a Swedish stage star and protégé of the late Ingmar Bergman. “In hindsight, it’s a very strange story,” he muses. “I come from a small village where there’s six feet of snow and I end up on Broadway.” As a kid, Stormare traveled the world with his family. His dad was an inventor of industrial machine parts. “We were a mix between a typical mid-American family and gypsies,” he says. However, his nomadic upbringing did not include exposure to the arts. “To say in my village, ‘I like ballet and theater’? They’d roll you in tar and feathers and hang you upside down outside the hot dog stand!” All that changed when, after a stint in the Air Force, the 20-year-old Stormare moved to Stockholm and saw his very first play at the National Theatre.
The Bergman Touch: The obscure Swedish play Stomare saw may have been a flop, but to him, it was a revelation. “Whenever I go back to that theater, I always go to the chair where I sat the first time I saw [a play]: far right, orchestra.” Inspired, he began working backstage, then attended drama school for four years. Cast in a touring production of Nigel Williams’ Class Enemy, he caught the eye of Ingmar Bergman, who gave him starring roles in acclaimed productions of Miss Julie and King Lear, among many others. Bergman, says Stormare, was a no-nonsense director, “very easy to work with because everything was planned in his head. Some movie directors, like Spielberg or the Coen brothers, are like that too—you don’t have to improvise and come up with a lot of ideas because they know exactly what they want. You can concentrate on acting, which is a blessing.”
Touch of Evil: When the world tour of Bergman’s Miss Julie made a stop in Los Angeles 20 years ago, Stormare quickly landed an agent. His ability to look menacing and gift for global accents made him a perfect screen villain, and he shrugs off questions about typecasting. “Everybody in the U.S. does [get typecast]. That’s why actors do the same thing over and over again. I don’t mind doing bad guys because I try to do them with a twist and some intelligence.” It made sense, then, that Stormare would finally make his Broadway debut as Ibsen’s man in black, Judge Brack.
He’ll Be the Judge: For Scandinavians, plays by Ibsen and Strindberg are an integral part of an actor’s training. “That’s our heritage,” Stormare notes. Of Judge Brack, who poses as Hedda Gabler’s older protector but quickly turns menacing, the actor says, “He’s like the Grim Reaper or the gatekeeper, but he also tries to save [Hedda]. We’re doing him more like he wants to save her, not just to savor her, to eat her; he wants her to stay alive, and he really wants to help her out of this dilemma. But he’s written like the dark exclamation mark by the gate, who’s waiting for dead souls to come. He’s a fun character to play because you can stylize him a little bit. Like death itself, he’s somehow alluring and enigmatic and a little scary.”
How Are You Feeling? While emphasizing that he loves being back in the theater, Stormare admits that the American style of stage acting took some getting used to. “When I came here, it’s all about your ‘own emotion,’ how ‘you feel,’” he says with a chuckle. “At my school, nobody out there [in the audience] cared whether your mother died or you broke up with your boyfriend or girlfriend; whether you’re heterosexual, homosexual or you eat kids for breakfast. They paid $100, and they want to see you act at the peak of your ability. Nothing else. But I am adjusting.”
I’m Going to Disneyland! For Stormare, building a successful career in America fulfilled his most exotic childhood fantasy. “When I was six, I always said [to my parents], ‘When I’m old, I’m going to live in California, close to Disneyland.’ ‘What are you going to do?’ they asked, mocking me. I said, ‘I’m going to work with the movies, and I’m going to take you to Disneyland, VIP.” Well, in 1996, I flew them in, in business class, and took them VIP to Disneyland. My father, who is a hardcore engineer—everything has to be proven to him on paper—sat on a bench and had tears in his eyes. ‘You said this when you were six years old, and here we are. It’s incredible.’ For me, life has been a combination of premonitions and dreams come true.”