Josephine Bornebusch, the Solsidan star who directed Baby Reindeer and went home

Josephine Bornebusch

Photo: Frankie Fouganthin / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 12, 1981 Stockholm, Sweden
Occupation	Actress, screenwriter and director
Known for	Let Go
Awards	Kristallen

In Sweden she is still Mickan, the status-conscious neighbour of Solsidan, a part Josephine Bornebusch has played since the sitcom began. Outside Sweden almost nobody connects that face with the director of the last three episodes of Baby Reindeer, the stretch where Richard Gadd’s account of being stalked moves towards its reckoning. Two careers share one name, and only one of them travels with it.

Her latest decision is the one that scrambles the international version of the story. After the Netflix phenomenon, after Rachel Weisz in Vladimir, with an Anya Taylor-Joy series on her slate, she went home to the Swedish mountains and made a slapstick farce. The Storm (Stormen) traps Gustaf Skarsgård, Aliette Opheim and a crowd of the country’s best-known comic actors in a snowed-in farmhouse after the chef stirs hallucinogenic mushrooms into the birthday dinner. “I wanted to find out whether you can make a farce in a luxury package,” she told the Swedish news agency TT.

Film was already in the family. Her great-grandfather Arne Bornebusch was a director, her mother Cian Bornebusch is a set designer and her father, Per Langöe-Christiansen, ran restaurants. Josephine, who was born in Stockholm on 12 September 1981, was two when Marie-Louise Ekman put her in front of the camera in Moderna människor, and she spent her childhood on the stage of the children’s theatre Vår teater. The breakthrough arrived at 18, in 1999, when she played the upper-class Madeleine Boisse de Blaque in the SVT ferry saga Rederiet.

The next decade made her a familiar screen face rather than an author. She acted opposite Alexander Skarsgård in Järngänget and Vingar av glas, both released in 2000, and again in Hundtricket in 2002, then moved into comedy: the SVT holiday series Playa del Sol, the sketch show Fredag hela veckan and, from 2010, Solsidan, whose theme song, “I’m So Happy”, she recorded with Salem Al Fakir. In Welcome to Sweden she played Emma opposite Greg Poehler, and she also wrote and produced on the bilingual sitcom, which ran on TV4 in Sweden and on NBC in the United States until its cancellation in 2015. A young-adult novel, Född fenomenal, came out in 2014.

The turn came behind the camera. After a family-film debut with LasseMajas detektivbyrå – Det första mysteriet in 2018, she made Älska mig (Love Me) for Viaplay in 2019, creating, writing, directing and producing the series while playing its lead, Clara. It won the Kristallen award for TV drama of the year in 2020 and was remade in Australia, with Hugo Weaving, as Love Me. When the pandemic postponed other projects, she and Gunnar A.K. Järvstad wrote Orca in a matter of weeks and shot it straight away; the script earned a Guldbagge nomination for best screenplay. Harmonica, in which she again created, directed and starred, followed in 2022.

Then the English-language industry started calling. Sharon Horgan‘s Apple TV+ black comedy Bad Sisters gave her three episodes of its first season in 2022, the season that went on to win the BAFTA for best drama series. In 2024 she shared Baby Reindeer with Weronika Tofilska, directing episodes five to seven of the seven-part series that became one of Netflix’s most-discussed releases of the year. That autumn came Let Go (Släpp taget), a Netflix feature she wrote, directed and led as Stella, a mother who receives life-changing news and drags her fraying family, husband Gustav included, to their teenage daughter’s pole-dance competition. Pål Sverre Hagen played Gustav. Bornebusch has said more than 21 million people watched it.

The division of labour she describes is also the ceiling of the international career. “At home I write and direct; abroad I mostly come in as a director,” she told TT. On Baby Reindeer, Bad Sisters and Vladimir the authorship belongs to Gadd, to Horgan, to the novel being adapted; her hand shows in tone and in what she draws out of actors, which is exactly the contribution audiences do not credit by name. The work she does sign tends to split its public. The Storm drew a four-star verdict from MovieZine’s critic, and a day later the same magazine was reporting viewers dismissing it as “a total mess”. Her own account of why she swerved into farce is candid: the subjects had grown heavier with each job, stalking and sexual abuse in one, cancer in another, and they come easily to her, she says, “because I am a worried person”.

The present is crowded. Vladimir, Netflix’s adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s campus novel with Weisz and Leo Woodall, arrived in March with two episodes directed by Bornebusch. The Storm reached Swedish cinemas on 2 October and Netflix worldwide on 15 October, with Bornebusch in the ensemble as Kina, alongside Filip Berg, Jonas Karlsson, Johan Rheborg, Henrik Dorsin and Gizem Erdogan. She got the idea at a real party in northern Sweden where the guests were snowed in.

Two English-language series are next. She is one of the directors of How to Kill Your Family, Netflix’s eight-part adaptation of Bella Mackie’s novel, written by Emma Moran, with Anya Taylor-Joy as a woman who murders her father’s relatives one by one and Clive Owen as the father. She is also directing on Apple TV’s The Husbands, an A24 production starring Juno Temple, adapted from Holly Gramazio’s novel about a woman who keeps coming home to men who claim to be married to her. Neither has a release date.

She is married to Erik Zetterberg, with whom she has two children, born in 2014 and 2016, and she has ruled out the obvious next step. “No, that is not the plan,” she said of moving to Hollywood. “I think it is lovely to have a base at home, and my family is very rooted in Sweden.” The test now is whether the director the international business wants and the writer Sweden knows can be the same person on the same project, and whether the next film she writes at home can earn the trust that Baby Reindeer bought her abroad.

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