Carl Martin joins to speak about Eskild's iconic introduction on Skam. Also interviews with Lisa Teige, Julie Andem, Mari Magnus and Morten Hegseth. Listen here
Full english translation here:
Torkil Risan (host): This episode we’ll talk about episode 1-8 of season 2. The season with William and Noora.
Lisa Teige: A lot of people were interested in Noora
TR: Already in season 1?
LT: Yeah. In Jonas and Eva too of course, but towards the end of season 1 and beginning of season 2 it took off, from what I could tell.
TR: How did you notice that?
LT: I noticed it first by being stopped in the streets. Which was an absurd situation in the beginning. And then you got stopped more often and lost of secret filming.
TR: Lisa Teige noticed the pressure more in season 2.
LT: I think I really noticed the pressure in season 2. That’s when we went to Gullruten (tv award show). And we got a lot of attention from the media, that was very new, and started to get shielded. Which was completely new as compared to being stopped in the streets.
TR: Skam became a hit for real. And someone who contributed to that was Morten Hegseth.
MH: I worked with a VG (newspaper) project called Panelen, where we talked about clips and pop cultural moments. And we covered Skam thoroughly. It highly affected my work days. I went to the apartment where William lived, walked in Noora’s footsteps everywhere in Oslo.
TR: In your free time? Or at work?
MH: At work. It was a lot of it at work. And on my own time I thought about- I’m curious about people, so I did a deep dive and tried to find out who these people were in real life?
(TR walks us through the scene where Noora plays guitar to William)
TR: Morten Hegseth ranks this scene high on the list.
MH: I’m still thinking about when Noora sat down with the acoustic guitar. It might be the most moving moment in Skam.
TR: And here I am, ever the cynical, and think that scene is a bit of a hard watch. According to show creator Julie Andem, actor Josefine Frida Pettersen also found it a bit difficult.
JA: She didn’t want to sing. Josefine could sing, she was very good at singing. So we had a conversation early on that it would be nice with a scene where she sang. And I don’t remember why it turned out that way, but it was something with the situation and William’s gaze. His gaze, where you believe he’s not just playing her anymore, you can see he’s falling in love for real. And hopefully we are too, because she’s so vulnerable and lovely when she’s playing. But I remember that right before we were going to shoot the scene, she just said “do I have to?”. And I said, let’s give it a try. And she starts playing and the hearts of everyone on set is melting. And she said you have to tell me if I look cringe.
TR: And I understand everyone here. Those on set, who’s melting, because it is beautiful, but also Josefine. It’s kinda like someone saying “sing as beautifully as you can”. It’s not just the character that’s vulnerable at that moment, you are too. And then it’s almost too good, she does a great job. But I understand that it was hard to do.
(skip to 11:23)
Sounds bite from Noora during her first date with William: What’s all this? Have you taken notes from a shitty high school movie?
TR: What about you Julie, have you taken notes from a shitty high school movie?
JA: Obviously. All of Skam is, in a way, a high school universe.
TR: And this Skam universe has gotten a bit bigger at this point in the show. In the first episode we met a new character - Eskild.
(sound bite from the scene where Noora walks in on Eskild and another guy)
TR: Typical Eskild?
*laughter*
TR: That’s Carl Martin Eggesbø you’re hearing, who plays Eskild.
CME: What’s happening here is that Noora opens the door and he stands with his ass towards her. A fun fact about that scene - that’s my friend Sebastian Warholm, known from Himmelblå and much more, who’s on his knees. We lived together at that point and Julie said “do you know anyone that can come and blow you?” He didn’t actually, but it was a very fun scene to have as your debut. That’s the first thing you see. You see my ass before you see my face in Skam.
TR: And Carl Martin really wanted the character to have some nuance.
CME: I thought about how in shows, often when there’s a gay character, he’s a stereotype - flamboyant and funny. And it stays there. My wish was that he would be more than that. I needed that for myself. But I didn’t really understand how that would play out. So it was more a wish that I spoke to Julie about. That character really grew with me and with Julie. I don’t think that I alone would’ve been able to- it’s Julie that has helped me to articulate what I wish to say with the Eskild character. But I also had a sense for the funny stuff and the type of comic relief that Eskil is. I grew up with Borettslaget (norwegian tv show) and Robert Stoltenberg’s characters, and I like to say that Eskild is a mix of Roy Narvestad (main character in the Borettslaget) and Linn Skåber in Hjerte til hjerte. That just happened, I was simply a product of that time. Eskild grew out of that. And he has a very dominating energy, but who’s also very caring. And maybe because I’m quite bad at following the script or have a hard time learning lines, I did a lot of improvisation and that turned out to be what worked with Eskild. Because I never said the same thing twice. I remember thinking that my role, intuitively, was to go into situations and crush them.
TR. Crush the situation?
CME: If someone has a project, I just dominate the room. He’s very dominating, it’s draining to be with him. He’s not someone who respects other people's space a lot. He feels very open himself and because of that he just assumes that others can be open too, instead of assuming they are closed off people.
(skip to 24:00)
TR: From Vilde Noora often hear things like “you have such good morals”, so maybe Noora needs to meet some resistance to her opinions. At least Julie Andem thinks so.
JA: Noora has very strong morals that can turn too strong and judgemental towards others. She’s a character with a conscience and she has to learn to lower her morals and listen to other views. All of season 2, from what I can remember thinking the premise was the question of what is good vs evil and what’s in between. You have Noora that’s explicitly good, and William that’s explicitly mean. And is it possible for them to meet in the middle?
TR: And William is an interesting counterpart to Noora. He’s reminiscent of Mr. Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Or Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’ Diary if you’re more familiar with that reference.
JA: He’s inspired by “the coolest guy at school”. The unreachable, mysterious guy. And he also had to have some questionable values to match Noora’s. And he was a character with a very firm mask. So you think “does he like me or not?”. Someone that’s difficult to read. And that was very important during the auditions when we were casting William. We had a lot of guys in who were great actors and who had the looks to be the hottest guy in school. But I remember thinking that Thomas Hayes has that unapproachable thing that’s almost impossible to play. A strong mask.
TR: I’m sure that some Ibsen fans are listening as well. And when it comes to couples to liken Noora and William too, Julie Andem has made a clear reference. The similarities between Nora in A Doll’s House and Noora in Skam was too tempting to those creating the Norwegian exams. In 2017 one exam question was: “In the two attached texts you meet two women with the same name. Nora in A Doll’s House wants to leave her husband. Noora from the tv show Skam tries to convince her boyfriend William to not leave her. Compare the two texts and place them in a cultural historical context.”
TR: At the start of season 2 the comments sections were really taking off. The show was updated daily and people were commenting on everything.
Mari Magnus: This was a point where it was all crazy. It had gotten lots and lots and lots of attention.
TR: There was one thing the fans had had enough off.
MM: They got tired of slow motion. They wrote “typical, now there’s slow motion again when a hot guy arrives”. This was alluded to in season 2 when William has been in a fight with the Yacuza boys and arrives at the school yard to a Kanye West song. The perfect song to the perfect clip. He says “I need a slow motion video right now”. The wind was perfect that day. We didn’t have a wind machine, but I’m sure someone commented “Wow, does Skam have a wind machine on set now”. But Noora’s hair just blows up perfectly when William walks by and such fitting lyrics.
TR: The guys are pretty cool at that moment. And the song fits perfectly.
MM: And the song is a nod to them, like “ok we know you don’t like slow motion”.
TR: Maybe worth noting that this was before Kanye West, amongst other things, became a self declared Nazi and his music could be listened to to a much higher extent without also taking a stand on the views he’s more and more associated with.
(skip to 33:45)
TR: To Julie Andem, Vilde and Sana were easy characters to create gold with.
JA: Always, if you placed Vilde and Sana in a scene together, something would happen. Because they have very different values, but also very different energies and ways they communicate. So they were always super fun to put into a scene together.
(skip to 38:10)
Sound bite from William: Why do you spell Noora with two o’s? Nobody else does.
TR: Thank you, William. Julie Andem can tell us.
JA: The name Noora was a muslim name from the start, because Sana and Noora were the same person for a long time. I had an idea of what happens if you put a muslim values in a blonde girl. And then if figured that just makes her a christian *laughs*. I played with different thoughts when I developed both Noora and Sana, that in the end became two different characters. But who were quite similar at the start.
