(updated as of 19 February 2025)
After going through his filmography—54 movies, 2 TV shows, 2 music videos, and 1 documentary—I've noticed the roles that he plays often fall into these categories...
#1 - because he's German, obviously, a Nazi. The bottom two are a little niche as he plays 'unwanted Nazi admirer'.
#2 - guy you can take home to meet your parents. He's played way too many of these—it's a given with that beautiful baby face—but these would be my top six. Bottom layer gets extra points for being a good friend to the elderly.
#3 - opposite that is the guy your parents warned you about. It seems Daniel has a lot of fun playing these, especially the top layer, which leans on the love-to-hate category. I can't tell if it's just my utter distaste for The Face of an Angel (if you know, you know), but I also considered adding Thomas Lang. Could be why Chris in Cargo made it here as well... because what even was that movie.
#4 - now we have 'man in way above his head by the situation his political ideologies have gotten him into'. You almost always need a trigger warning for the films these characters are in as they will absolutely gut you. They're often based on real people and events. So you will learn something about history while Daniel gets tortured into a pulp.
#5 as he’s gotten beefier older, he’s getting more and more of these roles: sugar daddy. We don’t know much about Dirk, but I just know he’d have to be one to be in a relationship with anyone. Does Laszlo count? I wasn’t sure.
#6 - and finally, 'expert in his field, kind of an asshole, but hella breedable'. Most of my favorite characters are in this category... I don't know what that says about me.
p.s. in case there’s any confusion with the old reblog tags, I’ve moved category #5 to #6 because I still wanted to end on it.
omg okay omg so i'm literally like 3 weeks late to this im so sorry but i have started reading farthest north and so far good lord. this motherfucker. is terrifying to me. like what do you mean you were a zoologist. what do you mean you were effectively an early neurologist. what do you mean you were an oceanologist. what do you mean you won a nobel peace prize for your humanitarian efforts. what do mean you helped spur an entire country's independence. what do you mean you did all this and that's not even the most remarkable shit you did in your life what are you TALKING about. and why did you do it all while looking like this
Fridtjof Nansen: The genius polar explorer and statesman
The first great thing is to find yourself and for that you need solitude and contemplation - at least sometimes. I can tell you deliverance will not come from the rushing noisy centres of civilisation. It will come from the lonely places.
- Fridtjof Nansen
Most people become famous for one thing. They’re the best at a sport, or they explore somewhere no one else has, or they discover something for science. Occasionally some people go on to have early success in one field before switching to another and finding success there too.
Fridtjof Nansen, however, didn’t seem to believe in limitations. Neither did he believe that anything was too difficult or that you should quit while you’re ahead. In fact, his life is littered with instances of not quitting but also deliberately doing things in ways that made it almost fatal to quit at all.
Norwegian explorer, oceanographer, statesman, and humanitarian who led a number of expeditions to the Arctic (1888, 1893, 1895–96) and oceanographic expeditions in the North Atlantic (1900, 1910–14). For his relief work after World War I he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace (1922).
Being half-Norwegian, Fridtjof Nansen was always a hero of mine since I was told of his exploits sitting around the fire listening to my Norwegian grandfather speak of Nansen in hushed tones.
For many Norwegians he remains a figure of admiration and respect. His accomplishments across many fields of human endeavour are still taught in Norwegian schools. I owe my love of the winter outdoors partly to Nansen’s life story. Whenever I hike across the fjords, or ski, or take part in a biathlon I think of Nansen looking down from heaven and grunting through his bushy moustache in approval.
Fridtjof Nansen (10 October, 1861- 13 May 1930) was born at Store Frøen, near Oslo. His father, a prosperous lawyer, was a religious man with a clear conception of personal duty and moral principle; his mother was a strong minded, athletic woman who introduced her children to outdoor life and encouraged them to develop physical skills.
And Nansen’s athletic prowess was to prove of the utmost importance to his career. He became expert in skating, tumbling, and swimming, but it was his expertise in skiing that was to play such a large role in his life. Not massively built, Nansen was tall, supple, strong, hard. He possessed the physical endurance to ski fifty miles in a day and the psychological self-reliance to embark on long trips, with a minimum of gear and only his dog for company.
As a boy Nansen strapped improvised skis to his feet at the age of two and soon became proficient. At the age of 10 he defied his parents to attempt the ski jump at Huseby – a forerunner of the Holmenkollbakken – and almost met an untimely end when his skis stuck on landing and threw the young boy forwards. His school friends were concerned until he showed signs of life and then broke into cheers and laughter at his crazy feat!
At school, Nansen was fairly average, much preferring sports to studying. He’d frequently take off into the forest and live like a survivalist for weeks on end. He became a highly accomplished skier and skater. At the age of 18 he broke the world record for one-mile skating and a year later won the first of his 12 national cross-country skiing championships.
In 1880, Nansen secured a place at The Royal Frederick University in Oslo and chose to read Zoology – a subject he hoped would lead to an active, outdoor life.
Fridtjof Nansen and his wife, Eva. Eva Helene Nansen was a celebrated Norwegian mezzo-soprano singer. She was also a pioneer of women's skiing.
His life course was perhaps set in 1882 when a professor suggested he take a sea voyage to study Arctic zoology at first hand. He shipped on the sealer Viking to the east coast of Greenland. On this trip of four and a half months, the scientist in him made observations on seals and bears which, years later, he updated and turned into a book; but at the same time the adventurer became entranced by this world of sea and ice.
The trip then was a success, allowing Nansen to develop and demonstrate various theories about the Gulf stream, the formation of Arctic Ice etc. He also first got the idea that Greenland could be traversed – something no one had done at this point. He never returned to his studies. In the next fifteen years he united his athletic ability, his scientific interests, his yearning for adventure, and even his talent for drawing in a series of brilliant achievements that brought him international fame.
Obtaining the post of zoological curator at the Bergen Museum later that year, Nansen spent the next six years in intensive scientific study, punctuating his work with visits to some of the great laboratories on the Continent and once by an extraordinary trek across Norway from Bergen to Oslo and back on skis. In 1888 he successfully defended his dissertation on the central nervous system of certain lower vertebrates for the doctorate at the University of Oslo.
All throughout his time in Bergen, Nansen had the idea of crossing the Greenland icecap. The furthest anyone had managed was around 100 miles East of Disko Bay before turning back. But Nansen had though a lot about this, and he had an idea! The problem, he figured, was that the West of Greenland was inhabited but the East was a harsh and barren wasteland. Therefore, any trek East from civilisation would ultimately have to be a double-trek across and back because no ships could get close enough to the East coast. So, any such journey was doomed to fail. Instead, Nansen planned to travel West from the harsh East towards civilisation.
Nansen developed his plan to cross Greenland after reading the accounts of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and Robert Peary, who had travelled eastwards from Disko Bay in 1883 and 86 respectively. Both had travelled by dog-sled. The interior of Greenland was still a blank spot on the maps, so expeditions did not even fully know what conditions they had to prepare for. Nansen was convinced by Peary’s report that Greenland was entirely covered by ice and snow. However, he did not have an experience with hauling animals, since dog-sleds were entirely unknown in Scandinavia. The Lapps used Reindeer, and Nansen briefly considered using those, but they would not find any food in Greenland, so he abandoned the idea, and instead chose to cater to his greatest strength: skiing.
Skiing was a popular method of transportation in 19th century Norway and had already become a national sport with competitions held in major cities. Peary had pioneered using skis on polar expeditions, but Nansen’s super-human skiing ability was what set him apart. He had already in 1884 undertaken a ski tour from Bergen to Kristiania, covering over 300 km in only 6 days, to take part in a ski race two days after his arrival. Even with modern equipment that would be an outstanding feat, but with 19th-century skis, it becomes downright insane. As we all know, skiing is still the primary means of transport for Polar explorers today.
Nansen had only 6 months to prepare for his Greenland expedition, so he had to make the best of the skills he already had. He knew that he could not cross Greenland alone, so he had to recruit a small team to help him out, and he had to do it fast. Since skiing was his strength, his team could not slow him down and he focused his team composition efforts on getting accomplished skiers on board. This was probably the weakest area of Nansen’s planning for Greenland, and could well have sunk his whole expedition.
At first, though, it seemed like he was off to a great start. On the same day the newspaper published his plans, he received an application to join the expedition from Henrik Angell. Angell was a ski pioneer himself and an army officer. In spring of 1884, he had made the first documented ski crossing of the Hardangervidda, a Norwegian plateau that is famous for its primordial landscapes offering hostile conditions similar to the ones encountered in the Arctic. Many Polar expeditions trained here, and many companies today still offer training courses on the plateau. Nansen, however, did not want educated Norwegians like Angell to join his expedition. Despite being the best example of the contrary himself, he was under the impression that simple countryfolk would be better suited to the extreme conditions posed by the Arctic. What he did not realise was that it was the educated Norwegians whose imagination was sparked by the idea of crossing Greenland. A simple farmer did not share Nansen’s desire to achieve the extraordinary.
Perhaps one of the gravest mistakes in terms of composing his team was to literally buy two Lapps via telegram from Northern Norway to join his expedition, without ever having met any of them. One did not even speak Norwegian. Unsurprisingly, the Lapps felt out of place during the expedition, with the older one even refusing to do his assigned tasks at times.
But it wasn’t only the Lapps who contributed to friction within the team. Nansen did not trust the others enough to take on some tasks. He was the only one allowed to handle the stove to heat snow because he was afraid the others would try to drink the high-percentage alcohol used as fuel.
Today, team psychology is its own area of research and getting the right composition of personalities is emphasised. Dr Nathan Smith has an excellent introductory online course on the topic, that I recommend to everyone planning to work in extreme environments. Nansen soon learnt many of these lessons for himself though, and for his second expedition, he took much greater care to compose a functioning team.
Nansen was right, however, to realise that taking more people would not grant any advantage on the kind of expedition he had planned. A team can only move as fast as its weakest member. Travelling in small groups has become the norm in Polar exploration, with many historic firsts having been achieved by only two people working together.
A new style of expedition requires a new kind of equipment. Nansen knew that, and he was busy finding the best providers for items he required. As with the team, everything started with skiing. While Nansen could carry all his supplies for his tour from Bergen to Oslo on his back, crossing Greenland would require him to man-haul a sledge. The sledges of the time had very narrow runners, which sank deeply into soft snow, making them impossible to pull via skis which are designed to glide, not grip.
The Lapps used a boat-like form, the pulk, but that was designed for soft snow and hard ice would destroy a sledge very fast. Nansen finally found inspiration in the sledges used by Norwegian farmers, which had broad ski-like runners. He designed a new type of expedition sledge by himself and ordered a local carpenter to build a prototype. His design was tailored to minimise weight by using leather thongs instead of iron joints. Of course with modern plastic today, the pulk form has proven to be the most efficient shape for the snow conditions in the Arctic.
Nansen also was advised to use furs on the bottom of his skis, to increase the grip in the snow while dragging the sledge. Originally made from animal skin, these skins are today made of nylon, and can be found on the skis of every polar explorer dragging a pulk. 50 years before steel edges for skis were officially invented in Austria, a letter from a fellow mountain skiing pioneer tells him of skiers attaching iron strips to the edges of their skis, in order to preserve the edges and increase the grip in the snow, but for unknown reasons, Nansen chose not to modify his skies that way.
The sledge and skis were only one aspect of Nansen’s gear where he demonstrated innovative spirit. But explaining them all in detail would be an article in itself. But just to give you a quick idea: he invented a new type of sleeping bag made out of reindeer fur. He was the first to introduce the layer principle in outdoor clothing, separating wind protection from warmth. He had a tent specially assembled so the individual pieces could be used as sails for the sledges. He designed a new type of spirit stove, with improvements to the cooking vessel’s capability to retain heat. He also was the first explorer to plan the expedition’s food based on nutritional science, although it turned out later that the pemican he ordered did not contain fat as promised. This lead to a nutritional deficit over the whole expedition, so bad that Otto Sverdrup considering drinking the expedition’s shoe polish, old linseed oil.
In all his endeavours, Nansen always challenged the status quo and sought to improve every piece of equipment, ranging from a simple piece of clothing to the ship he had purpose-built for his second expedition, the Fram. He took nothing for granted and believed in experimenting and innovation. He was the original gear-head and his perfectionist approach and attention to detail are shared by many successful explorers throughout history.
Nansen was a scientist and all his adventures could not take that away from him. He always displayed a great attention to everything going on around him and took every opportunity to study. He first encountered the Inuit native to Greenland on the east coast of the island. His party spent several days in the company of an Inuit tribe and while several of the men, most notably the Lapps, were trying to stay separate from the supposed barbarians, Nansen realised their superior abilities to travel in the Arctic and tried to learn as much as possible from them. After arriving on the west coast, Nansen spent eight months among the natives, learning much about their clothing, how to train dogs for dog-sledding, and how to kayak. These lessons would later be invaluable to him on his North Pole attempt during the first Fram expedition. Roald Amundsen emulated Nansen by spending time with the Inuit as well and learned many skills he used during his successful South Pole expedition 1911.
Nansen originally estimated the costs of his expedition to be 5,000 Kroner, the equivalent of 12,000-20,000 USD today. He applied for government funds but was summarily rejected. The overwhelming public opinion was that his plan was utter madness. Nansen was prepared to cover the costs himself, but would rather not have to. So he was searching for private investors and found one in Augustin Gamél, a Copenhagen businessman, who was happy to fund the expedition. In the end, Nansen’s Greenland expedition cost almost four times his estimate, and Gamél paid about half of it. Searching for companies to sponsor their expeditions is a common theme for modern explorers. Gamél did not profit from association with Nansen directly, as modern brands do, but his motives were also different. Back when there were still white spots on the maps, there were other ways to honour expedition sponsors. Nansen, for example, did name a mountain in Greenland after his sponsor: Gamel Nunatak.
Nansen understood that publicity is everything as an explorer. He was keen to publish accounts of his ski tours in various newspapers before starting his planning for Greenland. Even in the chaotic six months leading up to his crossing, he found time to write an article about his plans for a children’s magazine. But all this was nothing to what came after his successful Greenland crossing. Nansen had reached the west coast just in time to send a message out on the last ship but was then cut off from the rest of the world for the duration of the winter. While he was learning from the Greenlanders, unknown to him, a Nansen fever broke out from New Zealand to America, but particularly in Norway. Products advertising with his name popped up all over the place. While this contributed to his popularity, he did not earn any money from this ongoing craze at first. However, after he was back, a public collection quickly covered his outstanding expedition debt of about 10,000 Kroner.
What stands out for me isn’t just the fact that Nansen prefigured the modern explorer with all the commercial sponsorship trappings but his unflinching determination to succeed or die.
His expedition fitted in with Nansen’s general ‘no retreat’ philosophy as there would literally be no chance of turning back. Suffice to say that after a gruelling and calamitous time, the team made it all the way across Greenland. Before leaving Norway, Nansen had defended his doctoral thesis – the traditional last step before being granted or denied. On his arrival in Godthaab he found out he had been successful, a fact which was the furthest thing from his mind at that point in time!
In 1926, explaining his philosophy to the students at St. Andrews in his rectorial address, Nansen said that a line of retreat from a proposed action was a snare, that one should burn his boats behind him so that there is no choice but to go forward. The party of six survived temperatures of -45° C, climbed to 9,000 feet above sea level, mastered dangerous ice, exhaustion, and privation to emerge on the west coast early in October of 1888 after a trip of about two months, bringing with them important information about the interior.
After his triumphant return from crossing Greenland, you might expect an explorer to relax for a while. Nansen did. He took almost a whole year – getting married in the meantime – before announcing he intended to seek the North Pole.
Before that though geographic societies all over the world lined up to request presentations from Nansen. His employer, the University of Bergen, gave him an annual allowance of 3,000 Kroner and time off to write a book about his endeavour. In the years between Greenland and the Fram expedition, he earned his money with lectures in Norway, Germany and Britain, and by selling his book Paa ski over Grønland. En skildring af Den norske Grønlands-ekspedition, which was translated into many languages. Public speaking and authoring have remained a reliable source of income for explorers today. He also got attention from several companies he mentioned in his talks, whose brands he had used in the crossing.
Over the next four years, Nansen served as curator of the Zootomical Institute at the University of Oslo, published several articles, two books, The First Crossing of Greenland (1890) and Eskimo Life (1891), and planned a scientific and exploratory foray into the Arctic.
Photograph taken on 14 March 1895 as Nansen prepares to leave his ship Fram and begin his sledge journey to the North Pole.
For Nansen going to the North Pole became his nexy big challenge and it had been brewing for a while. He was convinced that polar currents would allow an explorer to drift very close, if not all the way, to the pole. His plan, therefore, was literally to sail into ice until the shop became immobile and let it be led by the currents.
Basing his plan on the revolutionary theory that a current carried the polar ice from east to west, Nansen put his ship, the Fram [Forward], an immensely strong and cunningly designed ship, into the ice pack off Siberia on September 22, 1893, from which it emerged thirty-five months later on August 13, 1896, into open water near Spitzbergen. Nansen was not aboard.
Realising that the ship would not pass over the North Pole, Nansen and one companion, with thirty days’ rations for twenty-eight dogs, three sledges, two kayaks, and a hundred days’ rations for themselves, had set out in March of 1895 on a 400-mile dash to the Pole. In twenty-three days they traveled 140 miles over oceans of tumbled ice, getting closer to the Pole than anyone had previously been. Turning back, they made their way southwest to Franz Josef Land, wintered there in 1895-1896, started south again in May, reached Vardo, Norway, the same day the Fram reached open water and were reunited with the crew on August 21 at Tromsø.
The voyage was a high adventure but it was also a scientific expedition, the Fram serving as an oceanographic-meteorological-biological laboratory. Nansen never saw his mission as a failure. Crucially, to Nansen “polar exploration without science was egotism, vanity and the cheapest form of nationalist flag-waving”. A third of Oslo turned up to cheer him when he returned.
Holding a research professorship at the University of Oslo after 1897, Nansen published six volumes of scientific observations made between 1893 and 1896. Continuing thereafter to break new ground in oceanic research, he was appointed professor of oceanography in 1908.
Nansen interrupted his research in 1905 to urge the independence of Norway from Sweden and, after the dissolution of the Union, served as his country’s minister to Great Britain until May of 1908.
His main goal was to secure Norway’s position as an independent and nation in the eyes of the world. In November 1907, the ‘Treaty between the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway, and Russia respecting the independence and territorial integrity of Norway’ was signed and Nansen’s mission was complete. Shortly after, while he was still in London as a guest of Kind Edward VII, his wife passed away.
Nansen then spent a period of time travelling and pursuing Oceanography – a subject that had overtaken Zoology in his interests. He wrote many scholarly papers and his work was crucial in defining a phenomenon called the Ekman Spiral.
In the next few years he led several oceanographic expeditions into polar regions, but once the world was plunged into war in 1914 and exploration was halted, he became increasingly interested in international political affairs.
For almost a year in 1917-1918, as the head of a Norwegian delegation in Washington, D. C., Nansen negotiated an agreement for a relaxation of the Allied blockade to permit shipments of essential food. In 1919, he became president of the Norwegian Union for the League of Nations and at the Peace Conference in Paris was an influential lobbyist for the adoption of the League Covenant and for recognition of the rights of small nations. From 1920 until his death he was a delegate to the League from Norway.
In the spring of 1920, the League of Nations asked Nansen to undertake the task of repatriating the prisoners of war, many of them held in Russia. Moving with his customary boldness and ingenuity, and despite restricted funds, Nansen repatriated 450,000 prisoners in the next year and a half.
In June, 1921, the Council of the League, spurred by the International Red Cross and other organizations, instituted its High Commission for Refugees and asked Nansen to administer it. For the stateless refugees under his care Nansen invented the «Nansen Passport», a document of identification which was eventually recognized by fifty-two governments. In the nine-year life of this Office, Nansen ministered to hundreds of thousands of refugees – Russian, Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Assyro-Chaldean – utilizing the methods that were to become classic: custodial care, repatriation, rehabilitation, resettlement, emigration, integration.
The Red Cross in 1921 asked Nansen to take on yet a third humanitarian task, that of directing relief for millions of Russians dying in the famine of 1921-1922. Help for Russia, then suspect in the eyes of most of the Western nations, was hard to muster, but Nansen pursued his task with awesome energy. In the end he gathered and distributed enough supplies to save a staggering number of people, the figures quoted ranging from 7,000,000 to 22,000,000.
In 1922 at the request of the Greek government and with the approval of the League of Nations, Nansen tried to solve the problem of the Greek refugees who poured into their native land from their homes in Asia Minor after the Greek army had been defeated by the Turks. Nansen arranged an exchange of about 1,250,000 Greeks living on Turkish soil for about 500,000 Turks living in Greece, with appropriate indemnification and provisions for giving them the opportunity for a new start in life.
Nansen’s fifth great humanitarian effort, at the invitation of the League in 1925, was to save the remnants of the Armenian people from extinction. He drew up a political, industrial, and financial plan for creating a national home for the Armenians in Erivan that foreshadowed what the United Nations Technical Assistance Board and the International Bank of Development and Reconstruction have done in the post-World War II period. The League failed to implement the plan, but the Nansen International Office for Refugees later settled some 10,000 in Erivan and 40,000 in Syria and Lebanon.
He died of a heart attack on 13 May 1938 after a bout of pneumonia that came to light while he was skiing with old friends. He had a state funeral on 17 May, Norway’s Constitution Day. His ashes were scattered at his home – now home to the Fridtjof Nansen Institute.
A great number of advances in all manner of fields are built directly off the back of Nansen’s work. He pioneered techniques for Arctic Exploration and developed the skills needed to survive in such harsh and impenetrable conditions.
Nansen’s name lives on in so many places. There’s the Nansen Refugee Award, given annually by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. There’s a Nansen Basin in the Arctic, as well as various mountains and islands in the Earth’s coldest regions.
Beyond our planet, there’s a Nansen Crater on the moon, one on Mars and there’s even an asteroid called 853 Nansenia in our solar system!
Finally, cruise and sea-adventure company Hurtigruten has an exploration ship called MS Fridtjof Nansen while the Norwegian navy has a whole ‘Nansen Class’ of vessels named after famous explorers of Norwegian origin.
After his death, his ethos was summed up by his ex-colleague Lord Robert Cecil. “Every good cause had his support. He was a fearless peacemaker, a friend of justice, an advocate always for the weak and suffering.”
Fridtjof Nansen was a trailblazer in many ways, and I think he can rightfully be called the father of modern Polar exploration. But he was so much more. A truly tenacious individual of whom Norwegians remain justly proud, Nansen once summarised his lust for life by explaining, “I demolish the bridges behind me... Then there is no choice but to move forward.”
In an Oslo museum I once came across a young woman considering a pair of Nansen’s frayed salopettes in a glass case, and saw that her face was drenched in tears. I remember (jealously) thinking – when was the last time anybody felt like that! The 1970s? The 1930s? These days, when an “explorer” gets dysentery in Papua New Guinea, we just roll our eyes. Their labours seem so self-aggrandising, so willed. Just as we no longer automatically assume that American novelists have important things to say, or European directors are going to describe for us human consciousness, we intrinsically doubt the sacrifice of the modern explorer. (Not to be too 21st-century about it: the map has been filled in.)
In a field stuffed with eccentric and mind-staggeringly arduous late Victorians, Nansen alone appears to have also been morally rich, and deep. There was a (melancholy) thrum throughout the programme of each contributor basically saying: isn’t this story incredible? Wasn’t this person simply amazing? How did Nansen come to be? And why? Could any conditions (politically propitious, unpropitious, or otherwise) obtain when we might think of a person again as this heroic? Perhaps the answer is as simple, and frustratingly random, as this: sometimes, a genius just turns up.
Nansen, the industry-leading blockchain data analytics platform, announced participation in an ongoing seed round for APY.vision, a key DeFi data platform, Invezz learned from a press release.
该平台还将完成第三方数据集成，以配合其种子投资，新平台使DeFi投资者能够通过跟踪其整个DeFi交易投资组合的链上历史来做出自信的投资决策。
