Lukas Moodysson will direct HBO’s first Nordic TV series, it has just been announced.
Moodysson is a novelist, short story writer and film director from Sweden, who is a big name in Scandinavia.
His new Scandinavian series for HBO will be called Gosta, with Moodysson writing and directing all eight episodes.
It will follow a child psychologist who ends up working in a small rural town and tries to be the “kindest person in the world” — but things don’t always pan out quite as well as he’d hoped.
Here’s five things you probably didn’t know about Moodysson.
1He was once branded the ‘most hated man in Sweden’
In 2003, an interview with Britain’s Observer newspaper — the Sunday counterpart to the daily Guardian newspaper — branded him “the most hated man in Sweden”.
It came about after his film Lily 4-Ever, about sex-trafficking, didn’t sit well with certain parts of the media due to what they believed was a ‘biased’ portrayal of the country.
He had previously also caused a divide between him and many of his fellow countrymen when he made a speech about “anti-elitism” after being voted best director at the Swedish film awards.
2He had to change the name of his breakthrough movie
Moodysson’s big breakthrough came with his 1998 film F***ing Åmål, which received a glowing endorsement from critics.
However, he had to change the name when marketing it internationally after US industry magazine Variety said they wouldn’t carry an advert for it due to its name.
Its new name, Show Me Love, came fro a song at the end of the film.
3He was an outcast as a child
The director was somewhat of an outcast when he was growing up and spent his time writing poetry — with which he found some success, having several collections as well as a novel published by the time he was in his early 20s.
He said he moved into film after getting “bored” by poetry, which he found limited his creative potential.
4He is a devout Christian
Moodysson is a devout Christian and religion has played a big part in his work over the years. He is also heavily socialist and a feminist. However, in a 2014 interview he insisted he was not in any way a “preacher”.
5His wife is a graphic novelist
Moodysson’s wife is Hedvig Agnes Elisabeth “Coco” Moodysson, who is a comic-book creator. She studied at the Comic Art School in the Swedish city of Malmo, where the couple life.
In 2008 she published an autobiographical comic-book titled Never Goodnight. She worked with her husband on her 2005 book The Health Center Fontanelle, for which he wrote the words. The pair have three children.