Acting career Danielsen Lie made his film debut when he was 11 years old in the title role of
Herman (1990) by
Erik Gustavson. After that, he didn't act for 16 years, but then he was approached by director
Joachim Trier to audition for Trier's film
Reprise. He got the role, and took a year off from medical school to star in the film. He has since acted in several of Trier's films,
The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw included Danielsen Lie on his top ten list of the best male performances of 2011. In 2016 he starred alongside Kristen Stewart in
Olivier Assayas' supernatural psychological thriller film
Personal Shopper, which was selected for main competition at the 69th Cannes film festival. Danielsen Lie is known for playing emotionally complex, sometimes mentally disturbed, characters. In 2018 he portrayed
Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the
2011 Norway attacks in
Paul Greengrass' docudrama
22 July. Danielsen Lie has played Norwegian, English and French-speaking roles. He performed two different versions of his role in
The Night Eats the World, one in English and one in French. In 2017 he made his stage acting debut in the role of obituary writer Daniel Woolf in Patrick Marber's play
Closer (1997). Danielsen Lie played major roles in the 2021 films
The Worst Person in the World by Joachim Trier and
Bergman Island by
Mia Hansen-Løve. Both films were selected for main competition at the
2021 Cannes Film Festival. For his part in
The Worst Person in the World he received the 2022
National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the performance was named one of the 10 best movie performances of 2021 by
Time magazine. The film was also declared the best film of 2021 by
Vanity Fair and
The Atlantic. In March 2023 it was announced that he was set to work with
Glenn Close on director
Charlie McDowell's
film adaptation of
Tove Jansson's novel
The Summer Book. He plays iconic jazz pianist
Bill Evans in the upcoming feature film
Everybody Digs Bill Evans by director
Grant Gee.
Music Danielsen Lie is a multi-instrumentalist who plays the piano, guitar, bass guitar and drums. On 11 April 2011 he released
This Is Autism, a concept album with music written, performed and produced by himself, loosely based on recordings from his childhood. In 2007 Danielsen Lie and psychologist Maria Øverås authored a Norwegian language non-fiction sexual education book for young adults (
Sex og sånt, Gyldendal, ). The book received an award from the Royal Ministry of Culture and Equality for best non-fiction and was also nominated for the Brage Prize, one of Norway's most prestigious literary awards. He has also written extensively on public health-related topics for Norwegian newspapers and magazines. ==Personal life==