Peter Stormare has been in the business for several decades, and he has the resume to prove it.
The legendary character actor has stolen scenes in such classic films as Fargo, Armageddon, and The Big Lebowski, but it seems his latest turn as second-rate private investigator Ingmar on his Pop TV comedy Swedish Dicks may be his funniest role yet.
Stormare is responsible for creating both the character and the show, which finds him sporting tasseled jackets and a questionable mustache as he attempts to solve cases all over Los Angeles.
“I just wanted to do some of my own projects later on in my career and there’s a lot of things boiling in my oven,” Stormare told FANDOM. “One of them was a Swedish private detective in Downtown L.A., but I thought the name Swedish Dick is kind of cool but Swedish Dicks is better. So I had to come up with a costar.”
And that costar came in the form of Swedish comedian Johan Glans, who plays Ingmar’s eager protege Axel on the series.
Despite all of the wacky situations the P.I. partners get themselves into on the show, Swedish Dicks was originally supposed to be a drama. But after collaborating with a friend who was more experienced in the world of half-hour comedies, Stormare decided to change course.
“I love to be funny, even if no one is laughing,” the actor said. But it’s unlikely that no one’s laughing at him as Ingmar, who he describes as someone who “pretends to know everything, but he knows nothing.”
But how much of Stormare himself do we actually see in the eccentric character he created? The actor says he wanted to see more of himself in Ingmar in the beginning, but he’s a lot less like him now.
“He’s taken on his own life, that bastard,” Stormare said. “And I would never wear that ‘stache.”
You can watch Ingmar and Axel’s antics in Swedish Dicks, currently airing Thursday nights on Pop TV, and hear more about what inspired Stormare to create the series in the interview video above.
