From spanking to swordfighting, why does the Dane have to keep stripping off? As he appears alongside Christopher Walken in Outlaws, the actor talks about dodgy directors, the joy of physical contact – and his booming synth pop sideline

This spring, film fans and theatregoers got a lot of Claes Bang for their buck, with the brilliantly named Danish actor starring in two of the most talked-about offerings of the season. In The Northman, he was the evil Fjölnir the Brotherless, stealing the crown of his nephew Amleth (Alexander Skårsgard). In “Daddy”, at the Almeida theatre in London, Bang played Andre, the gay billionaire art collector who struck up a relationship with a much younger, much poorer, emerging Black artist, and installed him in his Hollywood pad – complete with a real pool that drenched the front row.

Bang infused both roles with sinister charm – he was also, let us not forget, a superb Dracula on the BBC – while exhibiting a very Scandinavian attitude to nudity. In The Northman, he was swordfighting in the buff, while at the Almeida, a small venue in which there is no hiding place, he and co-star Terique Jarrett ambled around completely nude for quite a while. “I’ve done two plays where I was naked for the entirety,” he says. “I thought, ‘That’s it. I’ve done my naked duty. No more.’ But then I was approached for ‘Daddy’, loved everything about it, and it makes total sense that we are naked for that stretch of time.”

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