Couple Trouble is a Danish series about the most dramatic, stressful, powerful subject there is: relationships. Or at least, that’s how series director Parminder Singh and star Ditte Ylva Olsen see it.
“For me, relationships are like the most important thing in the world,” says Singh, who’s speaking on a Zoom call together with Olsen. “But also the most difficult.”
“So often, it’s the more intimate things that touch people the most,” says Olsen. “If your loved one doesn’t love you anymore, for you in some ways it’s worse than climate change.”
Esben Dalgaard Andersen and Ditte Ylva Olsen in ‘Couple Trouble’. Credit: Viaplay
Across Couple Trouble’s two seasons, we follow Danish duo Lise Henriksen (Olsen) and Anders Dybdal Jensen (Esben Dalgaard Andersen) as they meet, fall in love, get married, have a child, and go to couples therapy – though not strictly in that order. Each episode is built around a therapy session as they try to work out why they’re drifting apart, while the flashbacks show us what brought them together in the first place.
“You can have a script where everything is at stake but it can be very boring,” says Singh. “And then you can have a series about two people who are trying to improve their relationship and every second can be very intense. I don’t think anyone who has ever been in a relationship has gone through it without having difficulties. Not only will difficulties come, but they’re the only way to grow.”
Olsen was involved with the series right from the beginning. She was the first actor cast, was part of the process when they were casting an actor to be her husband, and played a role in developing her character prior to filming.
“Once we found the tone for the series, we made them a little less mature than we are ourselves, just to make the big-slash-little problems between them a little more apparent. As an actor, finding out how they would develop over the years was really an interesting process. We would say, ‘Okay so this happened seven years ago. And because of this, I’m more sore on this spot with you now’. What happened then will have an influence over the way they process the problem now.”
Anders (Esben Dalgaard Andersen) and Lise (Ditte Ylva Olsen) on their first date. Credit: Viaplay
One of the big challenges from a director’s standpoint was finding ways to show the audience how the characters were changing over time. For Singh, who directed many of the pivotal episodes in the series, it wasn’t so much about giving the audience visual clues about the changes as it was showing the ways the past still had a hold on the characters.
“In episode four, the honeymoon episode, we’re working with three time zones,” he says. “The distant past, the near past, and then the present, which is always in the therapy room. But this structure works with the theme of the series, because when you are in a relationship, there is a past but the past is always present. What you said two years ago, it still hurts.”
… we’re working with three time zones. The distant past, the near past, and then the present… but this structure works with the theme of the series, because when you are in a relationship, there is a past but the past is always present.Series director Parminder Singh
There’s a lot of hurt in Couple Trouble. Therapy isn’t a magic wand that takes away Anders and Lise’s conflict, and as the series progresses it’s increasingly likely that the best path forward for the pair might not be together. There’s a number of scenes that are tough for Lise to go through, but what was the toughest for Olsen to play?
“The scene that was really difficult for me, and Parminder helped me so much with it, was when my father doesn’t show up at the wedding. It was difficult for the character but it was also difficult for me as an actor. I really wanted to find her disappointment but instead she just shut down. I was a bit worried that it was me as an actor who shut down then afterwards I realised that the character would also shut down, she wasn’t someone who would start crying. As an actor I wanted her to cry a bit more.”
For his part, Singh says his work as a director was largely hands-off when it came to the performances.
“They’re good, they know what to do, they have done their work. What can I say? ‘Move a little bit more to the left?’ There are small things that you say if there is something you would like to see more of, or you could see a possibility, but otherwise they had their characters and they knew what was right for their characters. I was leaning more on them than they were leaning on me.”
Present-day Lise (Ditte Ylva Olsen) and Anders (Esben Dalgaard Andersen) with their therapist, Lennart (Rasmus Bjerg). Credit: Viaplay
Both Olsen and Andersen had to know their characters more extensively than usual, as playing them across a decade-long period meant they not only had to understand their relationship as a mature husband and wife, but also as people in the throes of young love and a couple increasingly out of synch, who find themselves struggling to be understood.
“I’ve been with my wife for 19 years now,” says Singh. “And for me, the basic premise of communicating, that was very relatable. I mean, you say one thing and it’s received in a completely different way. Who has not experienced this in a relationship or marriage?”
“For me, working these things out is such an enjoyable part of the work,” says Olsen. “We joked about creating a scale. ‘So how much are we in love? Is this a seven or eight, or is it down to three?’ That was so fun. And I enjoyed so much working with Andersen on this matter, working out where are we now in our bond. It was such a privilege to get to work with these little grey zones of everyday truth.”
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Couple Trouble - season 1 episode 1
