Corporations are hiring and hitmen are firing (guns, that is) in ‘Headhunters’

Roger Brown is a corporate headhunter and art thief with a habit for telling lies. Now his bad habits are catching up with him.

Axel Bøyum as Roger Brown in ‘Headhunters’. Credit: Lillian Julsvik

Roger Brown (Axel Bøyum) has it all. He’s a charming, handsome young man with good taste, stylish clothes and a drive to succeed. It’s only when you look a little closer that everything doesn’t quite add up.

He might have just started a fancy job at a corporate recruitment firm in Oslo, but he lied to get the gig. That drive to succeed? It seems as much to do with a giant chip on his shoulder about his height than anything healthy. Expensive tastes don’t mean much when you’re still living with your father in a shabby apartment. And why is he so interested in what kind of art his clients have on their walls?

If you’ve read the Jo Nesbø novel Headhunters, or seen the 2011 movie adaptation, then you already know the answers. Roger Brown – it turns out even his name is fake (apparently nobody becomes a successful headhunter with a name like Roger Pedersen) – is a liar, a manipulator and most of all, a thief. His speciality is expensive art, and his new job gives him access to exactly the kind of people who have it.

Roger Brown (Axel Bøyum) working at his side hustle in ‘Headhunters’. Credit: Lillian Julsvik

All it takes is a few seemingly harmless questions during the interview process and he knows what’s on their walls and whether he has to worry about being interrupted during his crime. Break in with a forgery, perform a swap, leave with the original. Often it’ll be weeks before his victims even notice.

In this prequel, we meet him just as he’s beginning his covert team-up with Ove (Mikkel Bratt Silset), a grimy gun-lover who a snob like Roger Brown would obviously never have anything to do with. Roger is the brains, Ove has the connections, and together they have themselves a very slick criminal operation. Or they would have, if things didn’t almost immediately spiral out of control.

Nesbø’s original story was a tightly plotted thriller where things started going wrong for Roger pretty much right away and kept on escalating in a manner both grim and darkly funny. At one stage, to escape the sinister forces hunting him, Roger had to bury himself in the waste contained in a septic tank underneath a farm outhouse; he also survived a car crash by being wedged between two hefty police officers, had to shave his head to remove micro-transmitters smeared into his hair, accidentally killed two people close to him, and skewered a vicious dog with a tractor.

Odd partners in crime, Ove (Mikkel Bratt Silset) and Roger (Axel Bøyum). Credit: Lillian Julsvik

This series does an excellent job of capturing the same intensity and escalating stakes of the original, only now with more brick-sized mobile phones as it’s set in 2002. Roger’s drive to impress a woman he sees as out of his league was always part of his character, but here we get to see how it all began, as his need for cash to impress art student Diana (Ingrid Giæver) directly leads to his life of (art) crime.

Soon Roger is juggling his day job trying to find a new top manager for the oil company Njord Oil with a side hustle stealing art. But the web of lies around him rapidly tightens as it turns out both crime and corporate headhunting can be very dangerous businesses to be in. The body count is rising, a growing number of people on both sides of the law have Roger in their sights, a hired killer from the UK is gunning for him, and every lie he tells seems to drop him even deeper into it. As for what “it” is, let’s just say history has a way of repeating itself.

Diana (Ingrid Giæver) and Roger (Axel Bøyum). Credit: Lillian Julsvik

Headhunters isn’t really a comedy of errors, though at times during a series full of twists, surprises and cliff-hangers it might feel like one. Roger isn’t making mistakes so much as he’s constantly discovering that the situation around him is more complicated – and deadly – than he first thought.

Things just keep on spiralling out of his control, and suddenly a man who thought his life of crime would be limited to some casual lying, and the occasional theft of some rich person’s art that they wouldn’t even notice was missing, is stuck in a world where the bullets are flying and nowhere is safe.

The one bright light in all this is Diana, who also happens to be the one stable person in Roger’s life. Maybe these two crazy kids can find a way to make it work; Roger just has to figure out a way to keep his hands – and everything else – clean.

Six-part Norwegian drama Headhunters is now streaming at SBS On Demand.