15/11/2011

At a press conference in Stockholm, Swedish Hollywood director Lasse Hallström announced that Swedish actress Lena Olin and Finnish actor Tobias Zilliacus, mainly known for his TV work, will join Sweden’s Mikael Persbrandt in the cast for The Hypnotist, his first assignment in his homeland since 1987.

An Ingmar Bergman favourite, Olin acted in several of his productions at Stockholm’s Dramaten Royal Theatre, including Miss Julie and King Lear, which toured the world. An early recipient of the Ingmar Bergman Prize, she played her first lead role in film in After the Rehearsal (1984), launching an interntional career that has since included The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Havana and The Ninth Gate. Olin first collaborated with Hallström on Chocolat, which was nominated for five Oscars, and Casanova. She most recently starred in US director Michael Uppendahl’s yet un-released Quad.

One of the most successful Swedish crime novels since Millennium, The Hypnotist was published in 2009 and sold 600,000 copies in Sweden, as well as the rights in 29 countries, overnight. The author ‘Lars Kepler’, who later appeared to be a married couple, Alexandra Coelho and Alexander Ahndoril, followed up with The Paganini Contract, also about the investigations of Finnish-Swedish Detective Inspector Joona Linna. Börje Hansson, Peter Possne and Bertil Ohlsson will produce a series of Linna mysteries for Swedish major Svensk Filmindustri AB and its subsidiary Sonet Film AB.

In The Hypnotist, a whole family is brutally massacred in suburban Stockholm, and the only survivor is the 15-year-old son, who is in a critical condition and unfit for regular interrogation, so Linna calls in a retired hypnotist to work with him. Linna will be played by Zillacus, the specialist by Persbrandt, who – after Danish director Susanne Bier’s Oscar-winner, In a Better World [+see also:
trailer
film profile] – has been attached to New Zealand director Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit series and two domestic features, Kathrine Windfeld’s spy thriller Hamilton - In the Interest of the Nation and its sequel, and Kjell-Åke Andersson’s Somewhere Else.

Principal photography for The Hypnotist has been scheduled to start in January 2012, and SF Bio will handle domestic release in the autumn. Outside ,Svensk Filmindustri International Sales has licensed the film to more than 30 countries.