When the movement started in 2017, Helin had confidence in the Swedish system. Surely Sweden – a stronghold of liberal feminism, ranked fifth in the world by the World Economic Forum on Gender Equality – would do the justice that women so longed for. Instead of banging their heads on a pike, Helin and her fellow organizers advocated an open letter and a campaign calling for reforms, organizing a public reading of anonymous testimonies from abused and harassed women. “Theoretically,” says Helin, “it’s very nice not to mention people and take them out, as we did in the Middle Ages, hang them in public and so on. It’s very modern and polite. ” The few women who made the name paid a heavy price: to date, at least 12 women have been prosecuted for defamation over #MeToo cases, including actress Cissi Wallin, who was convicted in 2019 after naming a journalist who allegedly raped her. The man denies the claim. “Anger hurt me so much,” says Helin. “I suffered for my anger.” Her anger was, in part, for her own innocence. “I realized that the hope we had was unrealistic,” he says, “and that people do not think about things as long as they can make money from it. I also realized that I have to stop being surprised by the same shit. “ Something else Helin has realized over the years, she says, “is how different Sweden is from other countries, and it also reflects how we organized the #MeToo movement in Sweden. “We believed that with trust and cooperation we could change something, but it did not work out as I had hoped.” There were warning signs. In 2019, Helin met actress Rosanna Arquette, who was at the forefront of the US movement, at a dinner at the Stockholm Film Festival. “She could not understand why we did this,” laughs Helin. “He said” and leave free? What is your fucking plan? Now, Helin believes Arquette may have been right. “When I look at it now,” Helin asks, “I wonder, did we try to approach a very dirty subject without touching the dirt?” For Helin, coming to her senses means being comforted in her work. “The way you breathe over the years has created Lust,” he says. She mentions in her latest show, an HBO comedy about four middle-aged women and their sex life, which she co-created. Today, as we speak at Zoom, Helin wears a large sweatshirt called Lust with the motto “Sex is the Highway to Health”, the name of the first episode. Helin stars as Anette, a researcher who explores the relationship between sex life and the well-being of middle-aged women, while reluctantly confronting the reality of her sexless marriage. “I’m a parent,” Helin says of her role, “I work hard, I have a long marriage behind me, I have several friends with the same experience. “I think it’s a global issue that happens to a lot of people.” Lust is often hilarious and clear. Between them, Anette and her best friends Nadia (Anja Lundqvist), Ellen (Julia Dufvenius) and Martina (Elin Klinga) have illicit relationships with personal trainers, go to couple therapy and, in a particularly memorable scene, a character. they accidentally throw a vibrator at their toddler. As Saga Norén, with the typical vintage Porsche, at The Bridge. Photo: Carolina Romare / BBC / ZDF “The desire came from a creative desire to work with some of my colleagues,” says Helin. “We explored what we wanted to dive into and realized we could not talk to each other about our sex lives, and that is probably the same for people around the world.” Helin and Lundqvist co-creators Dufvenius, Kalsa Kalmér and the lonely man Frans Milisic Wiklund sat on the floor of her living room, brainstorming. Around the same time, in July 2016, the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs announced that it would conduct a national survey on sexuality. She felt crazy and Helin and her colleagues created Anette’s character in response. But there are serious issues beyond the strike, which is not surprising given that Dufvenius, Lundqvist and Helin all joined the Swedish #MeToo movement. Anette is sexually harassed at work and is discouraged from reporting it by her boss. Martina’s husband leaves her for a much younger woman and she writes a feminist memoir in response. “I think you better say it in Britain,” Helin replies. “You have to laugh at things or you will jump off a bridge.” I’m interested in learning how Helin reconciles her feminist views with the outbreak of horrific crime dramas that portray violence against women, in part because of the astonishing success of shows such as The Bridge, in which she played Detective Saga Norén. “Violence against women is not something that is entertaining for me,” says Helin, “but I do not see it only in crime dramas.” He points out that Scandi noir does not have the monopoly of violence against women: “If you see any Greek drama, they kill each other.” Educated at the Calle Flygare Theater School in Stockholm in the 1990s, Helin remembers the actors rushing home to watch the British police procedural drama Prime Suspect, starring Helen Mirren. “I think the crime for us in Sweden came from the United Kingdom,” he said. When The Bridge premiered in 2011, Helin’s performance was celebrated because it brought an autistic character to a wider audience. (The creators neither confirmed nor denied that Saga was autistic.) But recent years have seen talented or neurotypical actors being criticized for playing characters with disabilities or neurodegeneratives: in 2019, Bryan Cranston defended his role as a wheelchair user in The Wheelchair , while the music film The Music, released in 2021 and starring neurotypical singer Maddie Ziegler as a teenager with autism, has also been criticized by some in the autistic community. “My job is to be a chameleon,” Helin says of the discussion. “It simply came to our notice then. “Just as people should be free, actors should be free to do whatever they want.” Helin in a scene from Lust. Photo: HBO Max Helin is a charming, honest presence and so anxious in my opinion about Lust or #MeToo that sometimes our conversation sounds less like an interview and more like a conversation between friends. It is unpretentious, despite the fact that it has gained the status of national treasure in Sweden, mainly thanks to the success of The Bridge, as well as the Emmy Award-winning series Atlantic Crossing of World War II, in which he also starred in executive production. He just had to mention Lust to producer Sandra Harms at a party – “not really sober,” Helin laughs – to get it done. Was she worried that her involvement in #MeToo would have a professional impact on her? “If someone wants to blacklist me, I do not want to work with that person anyway,” says Helin. He was not always so confident, but the racing times at least gave him inspiration, he says. “As an actor, this is my bank: having failed and experiencing terrible things – I get everything from there. Being a woman too – for example, I have never been to Hollywood, I have never been to Los Angeles, because I realized it was a place where you could be a part of being a woman. I also felt this very pressure that if I were to ever try to be in this track, you must be a perfect beauty. And before #MeToo, I would get the weirdest questions about my scar and why I’m not getting rid of it. ” She is referring to the scar on her face from a bicycle accident when she was 24 years old. In another case, a British journalist interviewing Helin asked why the Saga was no longer impossible. “I froze,” he says.[mouth] wide open. I was not prepared for such a question. Then I thought, “I should have answered: I did not know that Saga Norén was also anorexic.” “But I’m a normal woman, so I felt like a vulnerable person.” When she was 35, a director told her she had to rush to Hollywood because she had only five years left in her career. “So in that sense,” says Helin, now 49, “it’s such a relief to be on the other side.” He is designing a second series of Lust, as well as a play about “a woman of my age from the 12th century, who was a revolutionary, a holy person, completely fucking – started her revolution when she was 55 years old. Helin says it’s too early for this “giant project” to name the woman, but that she is attracted to works and stories where there is “an unanswered question.” For Atlantic Crossing, in which he played the real successor to Princess Martha of Norway as he personally and professionally navigated to build a diplomatic relationship with Franklin D Roosevelt during World War II, this unanswered question was “how do you run the country?” and what are the responsibilities of a leader? “ “It’s a lot easier to take a step back from owning a space.” Photo: Rebecka Uhlin / The Guardian With Anette in Lust, Helin’s question is why, when she is one of the most sought after researchers in the country, she is not able to express her sexual desire to her husband or impose house rules on her teenage daughter. Helin has seen many Anettes among the women around her. “[Their] “The biggest fear is to take over the space,” he says. “They already have the space, but they do not have it, because …
