My sweetie-wife introduced me to the joys of Nordic Noir, films and programs from the Scandinavian nations dealing with murder and investigations. One of our favorite shows is Arctic Circle, following the career of a police officer, Nina Kautsalo (Lina Kuustonen) in the far north of Finland as over the season she climbs from a patrol officer, through detective, to Chief of Police for the small town of Ivalo.

The current season we are watching, season 3, deals with a billionaire’s self-driving automobile being tested in the harsh Lapland winter, corporate espionage and murder, along with Nina’s continuing familial dramas. A key character in the corporate evildoers’ plot is Walter Blakeney, an American ex-special forces man who has done security work across Europe and has a quiet, heated temper.

There is not a lot of dimension to Walter’s character for any actor to play. We learn nothing about his life outside of his security work and the fact that he’s perfectly willing to do anything to achieve success. He does curse quite a lot when angry, and that has been the most jarring moment of his performance. Cursing, particularly when it’s a string of curses, is a lot like singing. There is a beat and a rhythm to it. It is pure emotion spilling out of a character unguarded and unconstrained.

But not for Walter.

His always came out with a closed, stilted cadence lacking a naturalistic flow or meter. I wondered if the actor was perhaps not a native English speaker and as such found the fast flow of angry cursing difficult to perform. It’s more common in British television to find Brits putting on an accent and trying, to varying degrees, to pass as American, and certainly this could have been the case here. It wasn’t. The actor was born and raised in America, moving to Finland in 2000. He just can’t pull off naturalistic cursing.

What a shame.