"The more I learnt about her, the more I wanted to be like her”: Connie Nielsen on becoming Danish icon Karen Blixen

“Let me show you where I got the idea from.” Connie Nielsen strides through the ground floor of the 16th-century building that houses the Karen Blixen Museum. We’re in Rungsted, an affluent suburb north of Copenhagen, and Nielsen is sporting a light black leather jacket over a white T-shirt and a pair of dark blue denim trousers, staples of a pleasantly warm summer’s day in Denmark.

She guides me to a small, dimly-lit room nestled in the northern wing of the building where the walls, painted in a dark ochre, are lined with a series of black and white artworks. She points at one that hangs in the far left corner, depicting a plaster cast of a female bust in neoclassical style. The preciseness of the piece is striking: the central object is intricately pen-drawn. A meticulous sense of depth and shadow reveal the expert hands behind it. The year is 1903, the artist Karen Dinesen, the birth name of Denmark’s most revered author before she married Swedish nobleman Bror von Blixen.

“I was startled and marvelled at it s beauty,” says Nielsen, visibly still in awe of the painting, which she discovered by coincidence on a visit to the museum a few years back. She was unaware, until then, that Blixen spent the late years of her adolescence using paintings and hand- drawn sketches as a visual means to tell stories and, as a woman, was prohibited from attending Denmark’s academy of arts. “It opened up a whole new world about Karen’s life and I wanted to tell the world about it.”

For the Danish actor, this quickly turned into a quest to tell a different side of Karen Blixen’s story. One that is anchored in the writer’s lifelong dedication to work, from her notable literary accomplishments to her lesser-known early 1900s sketches . “When it comes to female artists and writers, we don’t tell the stories of their work, we focus instead on their bodies and love lives,” says Nielsen, as we return to the leafy gardens that surround the museum and find a shadowed spot under a bushy tree. “I think that’s a betrayal.”

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In no time, Nielsen managed to rally a strong team and took on the role of producer for the forthcoming six-part series The Dreamer – Becoming Karen Blixen, where she stars as Blixen herself. The show, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, will make its debut on Danish streaming platform ViaPlay in October. It’s an exciting moment for Nielsen, who takes on the double role as producer and protagonist of a major television series for the second time. The first was in Close to Me, a psychological drama where she stars as a Danish translator affected by memory loss.

Yet it is Nielsen’s appearance on the big screen that brought the actor to the world stage. After attending drama school in Italy and playing her first role at 18 in a French production, she moved to the United States to gain a foothold in the industry. In no time, she was cast alongside Hollywood heavy weights Al Pacino (The Devil’s Advocate) and Russell Crowe (Gladiator), while also having a Hollywood-adjacent family (she had her first son with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich). These days she’s best known as Queen Hippolyta in the four DC Universe Wonder Woman movies.

Starring in the series not only catapulted Nielsen to a new stratosphere of stardom, it also made her an integral part of a blockbuster production that redefined a genre by focusing a female superhero. “A good story has nothing to do with gender,” she says, emphasising that the films encouraged many like her to take up productions centred around a strong female lead . “The success of Wonder Woman is proof that there’s a market for stories about powerful women.” Returning to Denmark to portray one of her native country’s most influential female figures in recent history was therefore a decision Nielsen embraced to its fullest. “It’s an honour,” she says.

Growing up in a small town on the east coast of the Danish island of Zealand, Nielsen vividly remembers learning all about Blixen as the skilled storyteller behind an oeuvre of genre-defining work. She developed a strong fascination for the author early on, matched by a relentless curiosity for the person behind the prose. “The more I learnt about her, the more I wanted to be like her,” she says. “A strong woman who’s not afraid to say what she thinks.”

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She read Blixen’s best-known work, Out of Africa, an autobiographical account of the 17 years the author spent living on a coffee plantation outside Nairobi, in today’s Kenya. It follows Blixen as she discovers her love for the land and affection for local culture, her affair with an English hunter and eventual return to Denmark. It is the book that led the Danish author to international recognition after it was adapted for the silver screen in 1985, with a young Blixen played by Meryl Streep.

Out of Africa’s climactic portrayal of Blixen as a love-struck author who leaves Kenya behind to re-establish a career in writing had never come into question for Nielsen. But as she began writing for The Dreamer, she came across a recently rediscovered collection of Blixen’s letters that shed light on the harsh struggles the author faced upon her return to Denmark.

“She was suicidal, she didn’t even want to leave Africa,” says Nielsen, emphasising the stark contrast between the established representations of Blixen and the picture painted by the newly-published material. This gave her a whole new sense of purpose and responsibility in writing the role. “I came to the conclusion that we weren’t going to tell Karen’s story in a glossy way – we had to show her life as it happened.”

The series begins as Blixen, aged 46, returns from Africa to the Danish countryside to move back in with her mother. She was sick, divorced, bereft of meaning and aspiration – a dramatic state of being that, as Nielsen argues, never properly emerged in previous recounts of the author’s life. The six episodes, filmed in a country house that reproduces the intricately ornamented rooms of Blixen’s original residence, go on to follow the author as her spirit rises from the ashes and she rediscovers her passion for the written word and the arts. “It reveals so much about the person Karen Blixen actually was,” says Nielsen.

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It was a particularly challenging role for the Danish actor, who endured a significant physical transformation and committed to six months of fasting to portray an ageing woman. For someone who made her name as a towering and muscular action star, this was quite the feat. “Mentally and physically, this wasn’t easy,” she says. “But knowing I managed to go through this is a major accomplishment for me.”

She takes me for a stroll through the property’s lush gardens that stretch into the surrounding woodlands. The extensive green lawns are dotted with bushes of flowers of every imaginable colour, the same sort that Blixen herself used to grow in this very space. Today, the museum’s gardener arranges the flowers each morning into the bouquets that Blixen described in her works, and places them around the property just like the author would.

Nielsen leads me to a white wooden bridge that arches over a small pond. Here, moments earlier, she was donning head-to-toe Dries Van Noten for her first Vogue Scandinavia shoot. It’s the first time Nielsen returns to Blixen’s former property since they filmed the series here. This time, she wears bright orange hair extensions and poses in a Han Kjøbenhavn suit, its shoulder pads so wide she could barely walk through the building’s narrow doors.

Throughout, Nielsen made sure to infuse the photo shoot with the right dose of Blixen. “Karen was all about rejecting norms,” she says, describing her perception of fashion today as being more about the expression of individuality than the adherence to specific beauty standards – an approach that Nielsen is confident Blixen would have shared. “This shoot?” she says and turns with a grin: “Karen would have approved.”