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Netflix’s Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole is a star-studded, gorgeously shot, wonderfully taut new Scandinavian crime thriller, but it’s also got a bit of a name problem. That is, Tobias Santelmann‘s hard-boiled hero is saddled with the profoundly silly name of … wait for it … Detective Harry Hole.
“You know, from the get go, it was like, ‘How do we tackle the ‘Harry Hole’ of it all?'” Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole star Joel Kinnaman told DECIDER. “It’s funny, I did a radio interview in London and the announcer there, he was like, ‘Harry Hooley.’ I was like, ‘That’s a really nice try.'”
Kinnaman then suggested how the memorable name worked in the project’s favor. “Yeah, I think it becomes a marker for the show,” he said. “So I think they’ll remember it just because of that.”
The name “Harry Hole” might sound goofy to American audiences, but in his native Norway, the character is a modern day icon. Jo Nesbø is the most successful author in Norwegian history, selling over 50 million books worldwide as of 2021. So far, thirteen Harry Hole books have been published. In 2017, one of the most popular novels in the series, The Snowman, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Michael Fassbender as Harry and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Harry’s on-and-off love interest, Rakul. The film became most famous for its baffling marketing campaign which centered on a poster with a crude drawing of the titular Snowman and a long message: “Mister Police. You Could Have Saved Her. I Gave You All the Clues.”
Photo: NetflixThis time around, however, Nesbø is taking full control of Harry Hole’s leap from the page to screen. As the title would suggest, Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole was created and is showrun by Nesbø himself. Instead of slavishly following his own publication order, though, Nesbø chose to adapt his fifth Harry Hole book, The Devil’s Star.
“I made that decision quite early on and the reason was that is novel where it sort of all comes together,” Jo Nesbø told DECIDER. “That is when Harry is fully formed as a character. The people around him — the important key cast, so to speak — are established and also Oslo is established as the place where he lives.”
Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole stars Norwegian actor Tobias Santelmann (whom you might recognize from the likes of The Last Kingdom, Point Break, or Atlantic Crossing) as this fully-formed version of Harry Hole. While Santelmann joked in a Netflix featurette that Nesbø could tell him how Harry would sit in any given scene, both the actor and showrunner told DECIDER that there is a slight difference between the Harry of the books and the Harry we see on the show.
Photo: Netflix“I think it’s different to sit and write what a character does and then feel an experience actually doing it. So sometimes that’s sort of when the writer meets the actor,” Santelmann said. “But yeah, it was a fantastic thing that Jo was so close by and always available so that if there was anything when it came to the plot, the story, or longer lines of the characters or just, you know, Harry. He knows because he’s lived with this person for 30 years.”
“Well, I know the Harry in the novels, but then, of course, it has to be Tobias who is showing you his Harry,” Nesbø said. “All I can do is to help him with things that might be useful and interesting for Tobias to use for this character.”
Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole also adapts key events from the novels leading up to The Devil’s Star, including The Redbreast and Nemesis. The connective tissue of these books is Harry’s ongoing rivalry with villain Tom Waaler (Joel Kinnaman), a crooked cop whom Swedish-American actor Joel Kinnaman plays with absolute relish.
Photo: Netflix“Yeah, it was so much fun. When I read the script, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the most juicy, mouthwatering character that I think I’ve ever come across,'” Kinnaman said. “You know, he’s just such a conflicted guy. There’s so many different things going on inside of him in every given moment.”
Kinnaman went on to describe Waaler as “some kind of malignant narcissist or a narcissistic sociopath.”
“He definitely has a sadistic side and also but it’s all sort of fueled and triggered by childhood trauma that set him off on to this path,” he said.
Nesbø’s very first Harry Hole novel was published all the way back in 1997. Since then, “Scandi noir” has become a super popular genre in its own right, thanks to the popularity of projects like Steig Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Danish hit series The Killing (which coincidentally spawned an American remake that launched Joel Kinnaman’s English language-speaking career back in 2011). One of the hallmarks of this bleak genre are desaturated color palates, with cinematographers leaning hard into greys and blacks.
Photo: NetflixNesbø explained to DECIDER that it was a conscious choice to make the world of Detective Hole feel hyper-saturated in contrast, especially when our hero visits the idyllic home of his girlfriend Rakel (Pia
Tjelta).
“It was something that we discussed a lot, especially me and one of the two directors, Oystein Carlsen,” Nesbø said. “We wanted the gritty side to be ten percent more gritty than it actually is in Oslo and the glossy side, or the beautiful side, even more beautiful.”
“So there are like two worlds: There’s Harry’s apartment, which is on the gritty side of town, him having this small apartment with a great view, but it’s sort of in a sort of industrial part of Norway or Oslo. And then it is Rakel who is like, she’s almost in the countryside. So it’s by the sea. It’s an old wooden house and it’s beautiful. And that is the peaceful side of Oslo.”
“So we wanted to have this big contrast,” Nesbø continued. “And Harry then trying to leave his apartment and his life before he met Rakel. So it’s sort of longing for her place, her house by the sea, but the character belongs in that crummy apartment.”
Photo: NetflixOne design choice that Nesbø left in someone else’s hands? Waaler’s flamboyant fashion style.
“No, that was my input,” Kinnaman revealed to DECIDER. “I think they originally had envisioned him much more like a suit guy, more like Jason Statham, sort of. But I wanted him to have, like, tight shirts and wider pants.”
“We shot this in early 2024, so like we’d just started to see the wider pants and stuff,” he said. “Now, of course everyone wears it, but at the time it was like still early for the return of the wide-legged pant. So it was important for me also that he had like a little bit of a feminine quality to him.”
All nine episodes of Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole are finally streaming on Netflix today, introducing fans of Nesbø’s books a version of their beloved character straight from the author’s imagination.
“We worked so hard on on this first season and we’re so happy with it,” Nesbø said.
In fact, there was only one problem Nesbø copped to having filming the show and that’s that Maxime Baune Bochud, the young actor they found to play Rakel’s son Oleg, grew twelve centimeters during production, prompting expensive reshoots.
“Maxim, if you’re looking at this, if there’s a second season, stop growing,” Nesbø said,
“I just met him, right behind there,” Santelmann said, pointing outside of their frame and miming how tall Bochud was now. “He’s 180 [centimeters tall] now.” (That would be five feet and nine inches.)
Nesbø said nothing. He just deeply sighed.
Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole is now streaming on Netflix.
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