Top 5 MHz Choice actors in American TV Shows and Films

In the Spring of 2020, we had the great pleasure of working with and getting to know the ever fabulous American actress, and Arde Madrid star, Debi Mazar. Ms. Mazar’s impressive body of work stretches over four decades from when she was a back-up dancer for Madonna, to her unforgettable turn in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas to more recently in HBO’s Entourage and TV Land’s Younger.

We have marveled at Ms. Mazar’s tireless energy and work ethic helping us promote Arde Madrid, which approaches super human level when you realize that she battled and beat COVID-19 during all of this. Have a look at Debi’s interview here with Live with Kelly and Ryan for more details.

Hailed as “brilliant” by The Euro TV Place, Arde Madrid: Burn Madrid Burn is an acclaimed Spanish comedy-drama about a right-wing party loyalist posing as a domestic sent to spy on Hollywood actress Ava Gardner during her wild stay in Madrid in the early 1960s. Starring Debi Mazar as Ava Gardner, Inma Cuesta, Paco León, Anna Castillo, Julián Villagrán and Ken Appledorn.

Why You Should Watch:
Arde Madrid has won multiple awards, including the coveted Feroz Award (Spain’s version of Hollywood’s Golden Globes) for Best Comedy Series in 2019. Also, the NY Times praised Arde Madrid as one of the Best TV Series of 2020!

Without a doubt, Kristofer Hivju is best known to American audiences as wildling leader Tormund Giantsbane from Game of Thrones. His definitive shock of red hair and intensity make him instantly unforgettable in that role. He brings an equal degree of intensity to his roles as brothers Erik and Adam in the hit Norwegian dual-identity thriller TWIN, and his equally intense performance as Detective Steinar Hovland in the ever-popular Swedish police procedural Beck. Kristofer is an enthusiastic promoter of his work and a huge proponent of English subtitles – we’ve had the great pleasure of interviewing him for both TWIN and Beck over the last few years.

On the big screen, Kristofer made his American debut in the remake of The Thing (2011) alongside fellow Norwegian actors Trond Espen Seim (Mammon, Varg Veum) and Stig Henrik Hoff (Codename Hunter, Good Night Darling). He followed this up with a supporting role in M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth (2013) right around the time he made his Game of Thrones debut. Subsequently, Kristofer co-starred as Mats in the acclaimed international hit Force Majeure (2014) before joining the cast of Beck in 2016. He got his butt kicked by Vin Diesel in The Fate of the Furious (2017), the eighth installment of the “Fast and the Furious” franchise. Most recently, Kristofer co-starred in the Sundance hit Downhill (2020) opposite Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss – an American remake of Force Majeure, as a new character not in the Swedish original! Kristofer has also joined the cast of the second season of the Netflix fantasy hit The Witcher, currently in production.

Why You Should Watch:
TWIN’s noir-ish opening episode sets the stage for some seriously compelling character drama, featuring dark family secrets and more than a touch of fish-out-of-water comedy. Kristofer excels as both Erik, the broke Nordic beach bum, and Adam, his outwardly successful brother – alongside the amazing Rebekka Nystabakk as Adam’s wife, Ingrid. And The NY Times hails TWIN as “one of the shows you need to watch this winter” (2020)!

Audrey Fleurot – No one plays a luminous viper like Audrey Fleurot. Her alabaster complexion, those other-worldly blue eyes, that flaming hair. She simply looks like an angel… as she shanks her opponent. MHz Choice viewers first got to know her in Spiral in which she played the heartless lawyer, Joséphine Karlsson. There’s no bad guy Karlsson won’t defend and no moral line she won’t cross to make a buck or get revenge.

In A French Village, she played Hortense Larcher, the discontented wife of a French country doctor. Larcher becomes involved with a Nazi officer, and her expression is so impassive as she enters the waters of personal and political betrayal it’s seared in your memory. You understand her, you hate her, you want to scream at her to get a moral compass. But you can never take your eyes off her. She literally eats up the screen.

In the 2017 French movie, The Berken Case, she plays tenacious military lawyer, Odessa Berken, her delicate looks belying her character’s steely tenacity.

MHz viewers might have seen her in recent years in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the French film The Intouchables, which was a big international and festival hit, and in the 2018 Netflix series, Safe.

Iben Hjejle stars as Dicte Svendsen, Denmark’s most complicated crime reporter with an uncanny knack for solving the cases she writes about. Iben got her big break over 20 years ago in director Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s award-winning feature Mifune (1999), a big hit on the international festival circuit, and followed that up with her first American film, director Stephen Frears’ uber-popular romantic comedy High Fidelity (2000), in which she co-starred as lawyer Laura opposite John Cusack and Jack Black. On the TV side, Iben is probably best known internationally for her role as comedian Casper Christensen’s on-again, off-again girlfriend in the cult Danish sitcom Klovn, along with its three feature film spinoffs. She has also notched memorable appearances in the Netflix series The Rain and the historical comedy-drama The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001), starring the late Ian Holm.

Why You Should Watch:
Dicte stands out by using its crime plots as windows into the psyche of a strong and engagingly complicated central character, expertly played by Iben. Each ten-episode season (there are three of them) peels back layers and develops rich, satisfying lives for all the characters. This is a crime drama – of course – but the focus here is definitely on the drama.

Danish actress Birgitte Hjort Sørensen stars as Victoria, a brilliant drone engineer ensnared in a sinister plot when she and her son are taken hostage in the high octane thriller Greyzone on MHz Choice.

MHz viewers first met Birgitte Hjort Sørensen in Borgen, the blockbuster Danish series where she played young journalist Katrine Katrine Fønsmark, squaring off against old guard reporter Hanne Holm (Benedikte Hansen). Over three seasons, Katrine and Hanne become friends, and Katrine shifts from writing about Nyborg’s policies to managing her campaign. We also follow the journey of her up-and-down relationship with Kasper Juul, Birgitte Nyborg’s spin doctor. It’s extremely bingeable, and even got American press when Hillary Clinton mentioned on the campaign trail that she couldn’t get enough of Borgen.

Birgitte has appeared in multiple other American productions, including episodes of Game of Thrones, the HBO series Vinyl and the hit musical Pitch Perfect 2.