Banged up: ‘Prisoner’ star talks acting, finding yourself, and being starstruck on set

Playing a prison guard who shares his Moroccan heritage was a great role for Hvidtfeldt.

A young man in a uniform stands sideways to the camera, staring ahead of him with a serious expression.

Youssef Wayne Hvidtfeldt in 'Prisoner'. Credit: DR Drama

Clean-shaven and with almost boy band-like hair, Prisoner star Youssef Wayne Hvidtfeldt is almost unrecognisable as the surly, buzzcut-and-stubble new prison guard, Sammi, he plays in the series.

“When we were doing the hair and makeup test before we started, they asked me to cut off my hair and then grow a big beard, and as you can see, I can grow no beard at all,” he chuckles, during a Zoom chat. “What I get is like small spots of beard, and I said, ‘Are you going to paint it?’ But the makeover artist was brilliant, and she said, ‘But why should he be perfect?’ And as soon as she said that, it was like the last piece of the puzzle put in place.”

Seen close up, so just their heads are seen, the image shows a leering man leaning in towards a young man in uniform.

Sami Darr and Youssef Wayne Hvidtfeldt in 'Prisoner'. Credit: Adam Wallensten

Hvidtfeldt plays one of four guards facing unemployment if their pressure-cooker Danish prison is closed for corrupt practices and who suddenly have to act tough with the inmates.

Impressed by the support actors cast to play the prisoners in the show, many of whom had spent time inside, Hvidtfeldt knew he had to step up to the part. “They looked amazing and I knew I was never gonna be able to live up to that, so I thought, ‘What should I do?’ And then it immediately hit me, maybe if I make my character weird, just straight-up robotic, that can work. And so that was what I got into pretty quick, because Sammi’s a cynical guy. He’s ambitious, in a way, he’s manipulative. He’s plotting all the time. He has secrets.”

A black and white image shows a young man in a white t-shirt and dark jacket leaning on his fist, with a pensive expression. There is a solid ring on one finger of the hand he's leaning on.

The multilingual actor, who is fluent in Danish and English, and also speaks some of four other languages, has a career that includes film, television and stage. Credit: Nanna Nyhus

A fascinating role, in other words. When Sammi first rocks up for duty at ‘The House’, a rundown and understaffed prison facing imminent closure – filmed in Vridsløselille outside Copenhagen, a style of prison now rejected by the Danish government in favour of places that encourage rehabilitation over punishment – he seems like the straight and narrow type.

Perhaps more closely aligned with

The Killing

star Sofie Gråbøl’s kind-hearted guard Miriam, though she has secrets of her own, Sammi’s perturbed by the overt corruption of ‘bad cop’ Henrik (David Dencik, Mikhail Gorbachev in Chernobyl) who shows him the ropes, but looks the other way when drug deals go down and closes the blinds of the guard room.

A man in a guard uniform speaks into a handheld, while standing in a prison.

David Dencik in 'Prisoner'. Credit: Adam-Wallensten

At first determined to clean things up, inexorably it’s not too long before Sammi’s playing games too, particularly once he realises one of the inmates, Benji (Gustav Dyekjær Giese) is a childhood friend who knew a very different version of Sammi. “I’ve seen Training Day,” Hvidtfeldt says. “There’s this narrative about the older mentor and the rookie, but I didn’t want to make Sammi naïve. I wanted him to have some kind of agenda, even though he’s new. If he went in wide-eyed, I thought that would be so boring, because we’ve seen it 1000 times. So what if he thinks he’s good at his job, but then he realises he knows nothing?”

The mean-spirited way that Henrik needles Sammi from the outset sets up another fascinating tension within Prisoner. “You don’t look all Danish,” he snarls at Sammi, who has purposefully dropped the ‘R’ from the end of his name. Like Hvidtfeldt, his character is also Moroccan on his father’s side.

“It’s a great role for me and I actually learned a lot from it, because for a long time, I had some kind of identity problem myself,” Hvidtfeldt says. “I thought that I was in place with who I am, but it made me feel a lot about not being Danish in one place and not Moroccan in the other.”

A young man in a prison guard uniform stands in a shadowy room, with several people, also in unform, out of focus behind him. He looks sideways, with a serious expression.

Youssef Wayne Hvidtfeldt at work in 'Prisoner'. Credit: Adam Wallensten

Uncomfortable memories. “Because a lot of these things I hadn’t heard for a long time,” Hvidtfeldt adds. “When I was younger, I hated these kinds of questions like ‘Where are you from?’. And I hated it when people were right, because they guessed my dad is also the Moroccan, nailing down who I was or maybe who I wasn’t, putting me in a box.”

Hvidtfeldt recently joined the new season of SBS fan-favourite Borgen, which debuted on Netflix after a 10-year gap. “It was the biggest thing I’d ever done, and it was during COVID, so everyone was wearing masks and it was a crazy time,” he recalls. “I was so scared and didn’t say a lot for a long time. I thought people would be minding their own business because it’s a big show, but people were so sweet. They were under pressure too, because they wanted this season to be good also.”

The first time he met the show’s star and living legend Sidse Babett Knudsen sent his nerves into hyperdrive. “You never see interviews with her and know nothing about her as a private person,” he says. “But she has this distinct voice. I heard it from the back of the lunchroom and I just froze. It’s funny because I never get starstruck, but I’m like, ‘Okay, she’s coming.’ I could hear her footsteps. And it was the weirdest thing, because now it’s so different. We really got fond of each other and had a lot of fun. She’s absolutely wonderful.”

Hvidtfeldt also worked alongside The Square star Claes Bang just after he shot Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winner, but before it was released. They starred in director Michael Søndergaard’s short film Hotel Boy, in which Hvidtfeldt played a young man – also called Sammir – in love with an older politician who’s concealing his sexuality. Bang had mentored him while studying at the Danish National Theatre, as did The Killing and Borgen star Lars Mikkelsen. “Claes was so sweet and very generous with his time, so it was fun to see him again.”

He’s thrilled if his presence on stage or screen sparks the ‘if you can see it, you can be it’ effect. “I’ve been stopped on the street by a lot of younger guys who look like me in many ways,” Hvidtfeldt says. “One guy said he’d never seen himself on Danish TV before, and that really touched me. Then he said something really funny, that his biggest problem was having to wait a week [for another episode], because I’m 35 and that’s what we were used to before. But the new generation, they don’t know that feeling because they can binge everything.”

You can binge all espisodes of Prisoner on SBS on Demand now.