Björk Guðmundsdóttir, known as Björk, is an icon of the Icelandic culture scene. She was a child star in her homeland, formed a teenage all-girl punk band, experimented with jazz, alternative rock, and broke ground in the electronic scene with her first international solo hit, Human Behaviour, and her debut studio album, Debut (1993). Unique and quirky, Björk has been prolifically producing music and charming the world since then. Her 10 solo studio albums are much more than just albums but combine music with technological innovation and push the boundaries.

Famous for her jaw-dropping music videos, Björk has crafted a small-but-fascinating acting career for herself and become a cinematic pop star. Björk’s breakout 2000 performance in Lars von Trier’s musical drama Dancer in the Dark won her the Best Actress Award at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival. Hours after being crowned for her role in Cannes, Björk announced that she would never make another movie. But 22 years later, she returned to acting in Robert Eggers’s lavish Viking epic The Northman. “This is a cinematic event,” Empire wrote.

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Here’s why Björk’s filmography deserves your attention.

A Sinister Fairy Tale That Gave the Singer Her First Film Role

     Rhino Home Video

In 1986, when Nietzchka Keene’s folklore drama The Juniper Tree was shot, Björk was just 21. She was still years away from the release of her debut studio album and international fame – but Keene, for whom this was also the first feature, spotted the freckly young musician’s on-screen potential.

Shot in powerfully stark black and white, The Juniper Tree is a haunting take on a Brothers Grimm tale of witchcraft set against an eerie volcanic landscape of Iceland. Björk plays Margit, a guileless medieval teenager escaping her home with her older sister Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir) after their mother is stoned and burned for being a witch. Björk gives Margit an appealing vulnerability, crackling with volatile magic. It is a delicate and sensitive work that is ripe for rediscovery.

The Film for Which Björk Will Always Be Famous

     Angel Films

Björk returned to the big screen over a decade after The Juniper Tree. She was accepted to write original music for Dancer in the Dark – but the film’s director, Lars Von Trier, managed to convince Björk to take on the leading role of Selma. The 2000 musical drama gave the Icelandic singer a role she was seemingly born to play: a single mother and a factory worker whose love for music helps her to escape from the trials of life with a degenerative eye problem. Björk was nominated for a Golden Globe for her brilliant performance and an Oscar for her moving song I’ve Seen It All. Also, she won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival (where Dancer in the Dark took the Palme d’Or).

Björk and Von Trier had different ideas about who Selma really was. “I wanted her to be more of an artistic character but Lars, who is a complete fanatic, wants his role figures to suffer, especially the female ones. I couldn’t really accept that”, Björk said. However, the artistic differences weren’t the biggest problem on the set. In a post on Facebook, Björk reveals examples of the sexual harassment she received from the Danish director (Von Trier declined her accusations).

Dancer in the Dark’s grueling shoot made Björk swear off ever acting again. Luckily, she continued to appear in documentary films about music, made a few fascinating concert films, appeared in the experimental work of her then-romantic partner, Matthew Barney, 2005’s Drawing Restraint 9, and even voiced the title character in the 2006 animated short film Anna and the Moods by her long-term collaborator, Sjón. But it is Robert Eggers’ 2022 The Northman that brought her back to the big screen.

A Cinematic Event

     Universal Pictures

The Northman is a historical thriller by the director of The Witch and The Lighthouse. Based on a medieval Scandinavian legend about a Viking warrior prince, Amleth, on his quest to avenge his murdered father, the film is a bloody revenge epic. The Northman stars a brilliant combination of Alexander Skarsgård (Amleth), Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, and Björk.

Eggers couldn’t think of anyone else but Björk to play a whispering Seeress in the film. “Björk is the like pop shamanist for planet Earth. Who else can just step onto set and be a Seeress?” the director asked Entertainment Weekly. Icelandic poet Sjón, who penned the screenplay for The Northman alongside Eggers, helped the director to convince Björk to join the project.

In The Northman, Björk steps into a brief but crucial role of a blind mystic in a wedding crown, signifying that she’s married to the gods, illuminating Amleth on his fate. She is only in it for one scene - but she gets a poster because you never forget her two minutes on the screen.