Is this the real First Lady of ‘Borgen’?

I meet Birgitte Hjort Sorensen in a plain office near the Donmar Warehouse in the West End. She’s warm, sharp and engaging, and her fast-flowing English is adorned with the odd Eurotrash platitude. Her American twang owes itself to the global language school of television. ‘I watched a lot of American and English TV growing up. We have it subtitled, not dubbed. Denmark is such a small country and nobody’s going to speak Danish outside of Denmark.We kind of have to learn.’

She’s about to appear as Virgilia in Coriolanus at the Donmar. How does she find playing the wife of a tyrannical anti-hero? ‘Interesting in that she doesn’t talk a lot compared to some of the other characters, who talk quite a lot. She’s, as far as I can see, the only pacifist in the play. It’s a very bloody, very much about war kind of play. All the others are engaging in the wars.