Director Sigge Eklund and breakout talent Felicia Maxime divulge details on buzzy upcoming film ‘En del av dig’

Sigge Eklund isn’t shy with his opinions. He’s been sharing them on his outrageously popular pop culture podcast, Alex & Sigge’s Podcast, once a week for over a decade. Case in point: his thoughts on films that depict the teenage experience. “When you turn on the streaming service or you go to the movies and see movies about teenagers, most are too nice. They’re not very scary, they’re very safe. But being 17 is not a safe situation,” he says. “It’s almost like life or death, remember?” He’s reluctant to name the key offenders because he “doesn’t want to be mean”, but he does reveal why he thinks films about teenagers – and for teenagers – tend to blunt their edges. “I think it’s a bunch of 40 or 50-year-olds, predominantly men, who think this is how to entertain 17-year-olds,” he says. “They don’t think they’re mature enough to see how dark the world really is.” It’s an ironic sentiment coming from a 49-year-old Swedish man who just directed a film about teens.

But Eklund isn’t just any man and this isn’t just any film. En del av dig (A part of you), which lands on Netflix in May, stars pop star Zara Larsson and heartthrob Edvin Ryding (of Young Royals fame) alongside breakout Felicia Maxime. The script, which centres around the complex dynamic between a cool big sister (Larsson) and her less cool younger sister (Maxime), was written by buzzy Swedish author and screenwriter Michaela Hamilton. Add to that Eklund’s own celebrity (in addition to the podcast, which attracts over 250,000 listeners a week, he’s published a slew of popular books, both fiction and non-fiction) and you have a perfect storm for an unusually anticipated project. Not bad for a directorial debut.

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Yet the question remains: why was Eklund the guy to helm this film? “Let me answer that this way: when you have a traumatic teenage life, you never lose your teenage years,” he says. “You’re still a teenager at 49, but you’re a teenager with work experience and life experience.” Eklund was a late bloomer, which made his adolescence unbearable in that aforementioned ‘everything is life or death’ sort of way. “I hated being so short and I hated that my voice was so light, it’s a terrible situation,” he says. “People don’t really talk about how terrible it is to be late to puberty.”

Taking a break from our Vogue Scandinavia shoot, Eklund is sitting in the kitchen area of a photo studio in Stockholm, clad in his uniform of black: black shirt, black trousers, black combat boots, shock of black hair. The only flashy detail is a gold Rolex with a royal blue face. “My brother gave this to me when he was drunk,” he says, referring to real estate broker and reality TV superstar Fredrik Eklund. He’s in town for just a few days, putting the finishing touches on the film, namely, the sound editing and grading. For a seasoned director, these final details might be humdrum necessities, but for a first-timer like Eklund, it’s something quite magical. “It’s like Christmas Eve every day,” he says. “I’ve always dreamt of these things – how do they mix? How do they grade? How do you make a movie?”

Armed with the belief that he was “put on this planet to make movies”, Eklund has been dreaming of these specifics for decades. He’s written seven un-financed screenplays and even moved his family – he has three children with his wife Malin, who runs a PR agency – to Los Angeles four years ago to pursue filmmaking full-time. Ultimately, the project that came to fruition brought him back to Sweden.

Well before the grading and mixing, there was an ingredient more integral to the film’s success: finding its star. Ryding had already been cast as the male lead and Eklund was in talks with Larsson, who he’s known for about 10 years (funnily enough, they both began experiencing fame here in Sweden at the exact same time), but he needed another actress to complete the trio. Enter Maxime, literally, who strolls in from the adjacent photo studio clad in a plush white robe and flip flops that are several sizes too big. Grabbing a poké bowl, she pulls up a chair beside her director.

Like many Swedes, Maxime was familiar with Eklund from his podcast. “I thought he seemed like a sharp one,” she says. Specifically, she’d heard him speak about films, concluding that, though he didn’t have any directorial experience, Eklund knew a thing or two about the medium. Maxime, who first became aware of the project via her friend and former co-star Ryding (she had a smaller part in Young Royals and they also appeared together in the thriller The Abyss), initially auditioned for the big sister role (Larsson’s role, ultimately). A couple months passed before the casting director called her up and asked if she wanted to read for Agnes, the lead. “He was like, ‘You’re too old, so it’s probably not going to work’,” says Maxime, who’s 23. “He tried to tell me how to dress to look younger.”

Hoping to appear 17, Maxime showed up to the audition in a hoodie and striped shirt, her hair in a messy bun, and absolutely smashed it. “I always have to play younger than I am – teenage roles,” she says. “You have to return to that mindset, there’s a kind of innocence in the eyes. You have to remove some depth.” In fact, Maxime’s audition was so good, Eklund used the tape to convince the editor and DOP to come on board. “It was so emotional, it was so powerful,” says Eklund. “What?! Really?!” says Maxime, learning this for the first time. “Yes, really. If you’ll allow us to, we should put it on YouTube,” says Eklund. He pauses and adds, playfully, “If the movie is successful, that is.”

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Maxime landed her first role in Swedish period drama Anno 1790 at nine years old and has been steadily working as an actor ever since. Well, almost steadily. “That was the first thing I ever auditioned for, so I was kind of lucky,” she says. “And then I realised it was really hard. I got hundreds of ‘No’s’. But I was really determined.” It was her father, a pilot, who really urged her to keep at it (in rom-com fashion, her mum is a flight attendant). Her dad ran a pretty tight ship, which meant less time partying with friends and more time pursuing her budding career. Still, one of her early recurring roles at home was “pretending to be sober”.

Though Maxime has enjoyed roles on a handful of Swedish shows (in addition to Young Royals, she’s appeared on Heartbeats), this is what one might call the role of a lifetime. One that calls for emotional depth and a transformation from wall flower to wild child. A role that shows she has the range. “If I could have picked any other role from any series or movie to do, I would have picked this one,” she says. “What about Black Swan, perhaps?” Eklund interjects. “No, I mean in Sweden,” says Maxime with a laugh. Offscreen, life has mirrored art, albeit less dramatically; Maxime and Ryding, who share a romance in the film, have been quietly dating for a few months.

When I ask Maxime how Eklund did for his first time, Eklund offers to leave the room. Turns out, the director’s inexperience was an asset. “I know you’ve been wanting to do film your whole life and you’re finally getting to do it,” Maxime says to Eklund. “Versus working on project after project after project... Maybe you don’t feel passionate all the time or it turns into a job. You were 150,000 per cent in and I knew I could call you in the middle of the night at 3AM and have a new idea about something.” On set, Eklund punctuated his all-black attire with an unexpected bolt of colour. “I wanted to have something bright every day, like a neon yellow,” he says. “The movie has some dark aspects to it and I’ve always known the biggest challenge in this movie is to have a balance bet ween light and darkness. I wanted to remind everybody that the movie cannot be too dark.”

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With his first film in the can, Eklund is already looking towards his follow-up. There’s a bidding war waging between a few movie studios over the rights to his latest novel, Gruppen, which depicts another group of young people having a sexy summer in Madrid. “So that actually might happen,” he says, hopefully. “I moved to LA because I’m very much in love with American movies and I want to make a movie there, so with the Netflix movie coming out and the book being sold to a movie studio, it’s not impossible.”

As for Eklund’s other gig, the podcast, which he co-hosts with Alex Schulman, it isn’t going anywhere. “It’s expensive to live in LA,” he says. Plus, he likes that it requires him to keep one foot in Sweden. “I have to see the movies, I have to watch the shows, I have to read the news – I’m part of Sweden still,” he says, noting that his wife, with her American job and American friends, misses home. The content of the podcast, however, might be slightly altered by the experience of directing. Namely, those aforementioned opinions. “I don’t think I’ll ever be mean again in the podcast towards a filmmaker,” he says. “I will still be disgusted by a lot of movies. But I don’t think I’ll criticise them openly anymore.”