Biography

He was accidentally hit by Mark Hamill during a fight scene in Hamilton (1998). He has broken his nose four times, last time during the shooting of "Unknown". A nose surgery was done in 2008, to prevent him from going blind on the right eye.

In addition to being a stage and screen actor, he was quite prolific as a playwright and a theater director.

Has played a German, (The Big Lebowski (1998)), a Frenchman (Chocolat (2000)), three Russians (Bad Boys II (2003)), Armageddon (1998) and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008)), an Italian (Prison Break (2005)), a Dane (Echo (2007)), a Norwegian (Switch (2007)) and a Swede (Minority Report (2002)) (The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)).

Discovered by Ingmar Bergman.

Is best friends with fellow Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard and is the Godfather of Stellan's son Gustaf.

"I grew up in northern Sweden in a very small village and this is exactly the same. It's very strange. It's two hundred small villages linked together. Living here as compared to living in Tokyo, where I lived, or in London or New York, this is so much more like living in the country. You go to bed early and you get up early, even if you're not working. You get up early with the sun and go to bed with the sun. That is much more rural kind of living and it suits me so much better than New York." - On Los Angeles.

"I liked the way that film took realistic events and added this slightly out-of-kilter perspective. My character in that film was, in one sense, a caricature of a killer, but there was also a sense of mystery surrounding him that captured the imagination. Fargo (1996) was an exciting experience for me largely because of the approach the Coen brothers took. It was the antithesis of Armageddon (1998). It was low-budget, a very guerrilla-style approach to filmmaking that made its own rules and was very specific in what it was trying to accomplish." --on Fargo (1996).

"I was a foreigner, and I knew that most of the parts I would be offered would be foreigners. I knew I could not compete with Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, and Nicolas Cage, and so I did not fight it. I saw the path I was destined to walk and decided to do the parts that would be offered to me as well as I possibly could." --on his initial career outlook when he first came to the U.S. to act.

Upon receiving the Fargo (1996) script: "Where are all my lines?!"

I've done Hamlet, and no one talks about Hamlet killing five people. No one even talks about sending him to jail. And it's the same thing for a character like Abruzzi. I think people root for him because he's just punishing people who are bad humans in a way. Always in movies and TV, in drama we always root for those characters. Even if they have killed four or five people, they have killed people that we've really disliked. They have done us a service. And he's such a character. That's why I've tried to keep him very Shakespearean. --talking about his character John Abruzzi from Prison Break (2005)