International Disruptors: Jo Nesbø Steps Into The Driver’s Seat For Netflix’s ‘Detective Hole’: “It’s Been An Emotional Rollercoaster”

Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week we’re talking to famed Norwegian crime author Jo Nesbø whose novels, which include Headhunters, The Night House and his beloved Harry Hole detective series, have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 51 languages. This week sees the launch of Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole on Netflix and the author has adapted all nine episodes and serves as showrunner on the series. Here he breaks down that experience of bringing his most well-known antihero to screen, who he writes for and what’s next.

Jo Nesbø is one of the most famous crime writers in the world and now he’s also a Netflix showrunner with a huge streaming series having launched around the world this week. Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole just landed on the streamer and the nine-episode Scandi series focuses on his beloved Harry Hole novels, the troubled detective that launched the powerhouse Norwegian author’s writing career.

“It’s been an emotional rollercoaster,” says Nesbø, who has been working on the series for three years. “I really didn’t know what I was getting into as there’s no real tradition of having showrunners in Norwegian TV series. So, it was a first for me, but also for the directors, and it took some getting used to.”

While he’s no stranger to having had his work adapted for the screen ever since Morten Tyldum adapted his 2008 novel Headhunters into a critical and box office hit in 2011, now the stakes are different as Nesbø not only serves as showrunner for Detective Holebut he also adapted all nine-episodes.

“When you write a novel, you control all aspects and when you’re writing a script, you leave so much up to interpretation,” he says. “It’s hard to let go of that control. I’m fine with the different variations of my work getting adapted though. Sometimes you have to leave it to a director that you believe in, and you stay away. That’s what I did for Headhunters and The Snowman – I just let the director take over. I’ve written a novel, the novel is there and that is my piece of work and now it’s time for you to do your piece of work and hopefully my work can be useful input for your creation.”

The stakes may be different for Detective Holebut Nesbø is no stranger to wearing different hats – in a former life he was a professional soccer player for Norway’s Molde, a financial analyst and is still the frontman of chart-topping rock band Di Derre and an accomplished rock climber – so stepping into the showrunning and screenwriting space is another testament to his versatility.

Crafting Harry Hole for TV

Nesbø is in his hometown of Oslo when Deadline speaks to him via Zoom and while he has that understated confidence that is specific to cool Scandinavians, he’s incredibly engaging and approachable. Indeed, few writers have had as significant an impact on the world of modern crime fiction, but he doesn’t appear too aware of that. He’s sold more than 60 million copies of his novels across 51 languages and is a core figure within the Scandi noir movement. But, at the heart of it all, lies his most well-known character Harry Hole, the antihero detective who has spawned 13 books (a 14th is currently in the works), including his debut novel The Batwhich launched his writing career in 1997.

Now, he’s returning to where it all began for this Netflix series, and for this adaptation, Nesbø is in the driver’s seat. The series stars Tobais Santelmann in the titular role of Hole, who goes head-to-head with his longtime adversary and corrupt detective Tom Waaler, played by Joel Kinnaman, as they both work to catch a serial killer and bring Waaler to justice before it’s too late.

“I really don’t know what it is that people like about Harry Hole,” admits Nesbø. “Obviously he’s a character that is well-established in the detective genre: a hard-thinking, romantic cynic and brilliant detective. But it’s not as if I’ve invented something totally new. If anything, I probably use those clichés and embrace them more than shying away from them because I love the hard-boiled detective. And since it’s working for me, I have no need of analyzing why people like it.”

Indeed, Hole is not the most reassuring detective. He is deeply flawed, an alcoholic who has a knack for meeting the wrong women and overall, a bit of a loner. But it’s his strong sense of justice pushes him along through life.

After producing the 2017 film version of The Snowmanthe seventh book in the Harry Hole series, which saw Michael Fassbender play Hole, Working Title approached Nesbø to get involved for a TV series based on Hole, hoping he would adapt a few scripts for what was originally conceived as an English-language series. When producers pivoted to make it in Norwegian and set the series in Oslo, Nesbø says “that’s when I really became interested.”

Oslo, he says, is integral to the story and he likens it to a Gotham City version of the real thing. And there are details, such as the sense of humor he uses, that “only partly translates to English.”

Nesbø ended up writing the whole series, which is largely based on The Devil’s Starthe fifth book in the novel series, but also has a recap of the previous two books. He’s reticent to say that it’s “faithful” to the books – “there’s no need to be faithful – it’s another story”, but he does feel confident that readers will recognize it.

“We didn’t feel any obligation to please the readers in any way,” he says. “The way my storytelling works, the audience will know it’s the same DNA. I’m not recreating the novel.”

When pressed on whether there’s an advantage to adapting your own work for the screen because the knowledge of the material so inherent, Nesbø quips: “The only advantage is that I have no respect for the author’s material so I feel I can do anything I like, which I have.”

The series, which is co-directed by Øystein Karlsen and Anna Zackrisson, has some new storylines and Nesbø says he takes some of the characters and scenes even farther than the original novel. “Some of the scenes are maybe a bit more extreme than in the book.”

Nesbø admits he was a huge fan of Kinnaman in Quick Cash and House of Cards and he and the production team were keen to cast him, but when it came to finding their Harry, the process was a little trickier.

“When we had Tobias in for a test screening, we thought he was too nice and way too good looking,” he admits. “He has this warmth about him, and we didn’t want Harry to be warm. After the test screening, we didn’t think he was right for the role, so we kept on looking.”

But they couldn’t get Santelmann out of their head and ultimately brought him back to re-audition. “The next time he was totally different. It was as if he had realized who Harry was and he did such a brilliant screen test.”

First steps

The seeds for Nesbø’s writing career were, he says, planted at a very young age when he used to listen to his relatives at Christmas time “always telling the same stories.”

“It was like a story telling competition and we all knew the punchline of the story,” he says. “That was my writers’ school.”

As a teenager, his friends in a band would ask him to write rock lyrics for their songs, a fond memory for him. “I would learn to write a story in three verses and a refrain, which also comes in handy when you start writing novels. When I started on my first novel, I thought it was all about filling 300 pages, but then I realized they are exactly the same – you have to leave most of the story and images up to your readers’ imagination and intelligence. You have to trust them to fill out the blank spaces.”

The transition of adapting novels for the screen was a “much harder” exercise for Nesbø. “Writing for movies or TV is about letting pictures tell the story and you can’t avoid bringing your bad habits with you. Even if you try to cut down on dialogue, novelists are simply too wordy.”

While he wrote every episode for Detective HoleNesbø was not going into the scriptwriting world blindly. He previously wrote two episodes of Karlsen’s So Long, Marianne and is currently writing the first draft of a script for Cary Joji Fukunaga’s upcoming adaptation of his novel Blood On Snow. The film, which is premiering in the UK as a Sky Original film, stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Eva Green, Emma Laird and Ben Mendelsohn. Also set in Oslo’s criminal underworld, it follows a contract killer (Taylor-Johnson) who, when faced with an emotionally charged moral dilemma, must form an uneasy alliance, which drags him into the heart of Oslo’s deadly gang war.

“I’ll leave it at some point and Cary will take it to his screenwriter [Ben Powers] and I’m really happy with that,” he says. “It looks really good.”

He’s also co-written the screenplay for an adaptation of his bestselling novel The Night House with Quick Cash director Jesper Ganslandt. That film, which stars Aaron Paul and Jacob Tremblay and is produced by Fredrik Wikström Nicastro’s Hope Studios, wrapped shooting last year.

Book IP & writing for friends

There’s no question that the appetite for book adaptations in the film and TV space is huge. Earlier this month, Nesbø was a guest speaker at the London Book Fair and at the same event, Netflix execs touted that around 50% of the streamer’s content is based on book adaptations. For Nesbø, this isn’t a statistic or a landscape that he pays much attention to.

“My eyes are on the screen. I consciously stay as little in contact with the industry and even my readers as possible. I don’t analyze why people like my work. I write for two friends of mine – they don’t know who they are, but I’ve been writing for them from the beginning. They are friends of whom I share the same tastes in movies and music and literature and those are the two guys I’m trying to impress. I don’t really care about the rest of the world. Even if you asked me about crime literature in Scandinavia, I have no information.”

But when pressed, he muses that the seemingly endless trend for book IP and adaptation could be because “novels are freer than movies.”

“Audiences are getting so trained and so used to a structure of a movie, that it feels like they are more and more open to different structures.” He cites Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Anotherinspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, as a prime example.

“We love it because we haven’t seen anything like this. The structure is just totally different.”

Nesbø recently published standalone novel Wolf Hour and he’s currently working on another standalone novel that he’s “just about to finish.” There’s also a 14th Harry Hole novel in the works, which he anticipates dropping in the fall this year.

These days it takes him “longer and longer” to finish his novels, and he says he now spends as much time researching his books as he does writing them. “I wrote the first Harry Hole novel in five weeks,” Nesbø recalls. “It was like being addicted to a new drug. I was writing literally 16 hours a day. I don’t do that anymore.”

He continues: “But I know now it’s just a matter of putting it on paper. It also gives me that feeling that I’m back at those Christmas parties with my family and I can tell everybody to come closer, because I have this beautiful story to tell you and trust me, I know where we’re going.”