Iben Hjejle - actress - Brief Article - Interview

Hard to say, not to watch

When home in Denmark, Iben Hjejle is cursed with fewer than five hours' winter daylight, frequently frigid temperatures, and a sixty-percent tax rate. Yet when the twenty-eight-year-old actress recently visited New York City to promote the new Dogma flick Mifune, an edgy comedy-drama in which she plays a plucky prostitute turned housekeeper, she couldn't wait to get back to Copenhagen. "I'd never move here," she said with the same frankness that makes her unbridled performance in Mifune so delectably disarming. "America isn't liberal enough for me."

Of course, that doesn't mean Hjejle won't travel to the U.S. for work. Last summer she went to Chicago, her drummer husband and baby boy in tow, to appear opposite John Cusack in her first American film, High Fidelity, based on British author Nick Hornby's novel about a guy more attuned to pop music than women's feelings; it opens on March 31.

An established Scandinavian stage and screen star, Hjejle (pronounced Yl-leh) found her baptismal American experience quite eye-opening. "Movie stars are treated like superheroes here," she remarked. "In Denmark you're just a normal person doing a job like everyone else." Would she be tempted to do more American films, though? "Once every other year would be nice," she said with a brilliant, sultry smile, making it hard to believe any place she goes could ever be dark or cold.

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