Finland May Have Found Its Very Own ‘White Lotus’ In Dark Industry Satire ‘Supporting Actor’

'Supporting Actor' was written and directed by Niklas Lindgren, airs on Finland's Nelonen and has shades of 'White Lotus'.

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Services to share this page. 'Supporting Actor' Ilkka Saastamoinen/Endemol Shine Finland

Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s strand in which we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track. So we’re going to do the hard work for you.

We head to Scandinavia this week to see what’s been happening in Finland, where Nelonen’s Supporting Actor has been breaking records for the commercial broadcaster. With shades of some of the biggest American hits of the past two decades, this one about a cursed supporting artist could be ripe for an international remake.

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Name: Supporting ActorCountry: FinlandNetwork: NelonenProducer: Banijay FinlandInternational sales: Banijay RightsFor fans of: White Lotus, Barry

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Producer Max Malka describes Supporting Actor, her latest scripted project at Banijay Finland, as the “Finnish White Lotus.” 

She draws the comparison jokingly, identifying that both are released weekly by their broadcasters. But the shows do share similarities — chiefly, they both have auteur-driven writer-directors. With Supporting Actor, it’s Niklas Lindgren, best known in the Scandi nation for the series Idiomatic and the 2022 feature Bad Women. They both also boast killer elevator pitches. 

Across eight, 20-odd minute episodes, Supporting Actor follows Aki Kurki, a talented but difficult actor plagued by his inability to land leading roles. He is only ever cast as the supporting, comedic relief. Attempting to discover why he can’t make the jump to leading man, Aki stumbles across a fortune teller, who claims his professional shortcomings are the result of a curse placed on him. To lift the curse, Aki must first uncover who placed it, but a lifelong focus on fame and fortune has made Aki a long list of enemies.

“I originally just wanted to write about and explore ideas of success,” Lindgren tells Deadline from his studio in Helsinki. 

Lindgren brought the series to Malka – who he has known since film school – in 2019. At that point, the story was smaller in scale and didn’t involve any curses or fortune tellers. 

“The first version was about Aki and his ex-wife, Ronya, who was once an actor but was beginning a screenwriting career. The story just followed them as two freelance workers trying to make a living,” Lindgren says. “I don’t know if Max liked it, but all the networks certainly hated it.”

Malka recommended, at that point, a series of additions including the curse storyline, which, as Lindgren describes it, brought the structure of the series together quickly. Development was around two years. 

“Relatively little changed. All of the different characters and themes were in the original version,” Malka says. “The curse just gave the project a stronger structure and made it easier to pitch.” 

The series is now four episodes into an eight-week run on Big Brother and Amazing Race Suomi channel Nelonen, one of Finland’s commercial broadcasters, which it says makes Supporting Actor the network’s most-watched scripted series of all time (although it didn’t give numbers).

Cinematic style

Supporting Actor has earned positive notices from local critics who have praised the clever magical narrative device and described Lindgren’s visual approach as “cinematic” — an adjective increasingly used to describe shows akin to Supporting Actor that boast strikingly slick visual compositions. Lindgren cites HBO’s Succession and Barry alongside Donald Glover’s Atlanta as artistic inspirations. 

“Those were the kind of shows we were looking at. They’re really cinematic and groundbreaking in their storytelling. That’s what we were aiming for. We weren’t just aiming to make a comedy. It also had to look good,” he says.

Malka credits the show’s visual style to a particular professional and artistic pride instilled in both her and Lindgren during their film school education. 

“It doesn’t actually matter what the genre is, you want to tell a story as well as you possibly can with the best people you possibly can,” she adds. 

But did all the visual bells and whistles add unnecessary cost to the production? In the case of Supporting Actor, not really.

“We could have probably gone into production a year earlier if we had settled for an even lower budget,” Malka says, adding that the overall cost wasn’t dissimilar to the industry standards in Finland. 

“It was probably around the average of what an 8 x 25-minute show in Finland costs. It’s maybe 10% more than some of the cheapest ones, but not much more,” Malka says. 

As with most budget negotiations, the last piece in the commissioning puzzle was talent. Kari Ketonen is the titular supporting actor, and like his character in the show, he is a popular and well-regarded local performer. But until now, ironically, he only booked supporting gigs. Malka and Lindgren say they had Ketonen in mind from the start. 

“His agent is actually a big media personality in Finland and had given an interview recently saying that he was going to stop acting and was planning to leave the country and industry,” Malka says of Ketonen. “One month later, we sent him the script, and he said, ‘I’m in.’ So we had exclusive access to this talent that nobody else had and that the broadcaster really wanted.” 

Lindgren describes Ketonen as a “perfectionist” who can be “pretty intense on set,” but cites the actor as an early and dedicated backer of the project. 

“We were working on the first version of the show without the curse, and when I told him it wasn’t going forward he was bummed out,” Lindgren said. “But when I called him a few months later with the new idea his response was ‘Aki is now cursed? That’s good because I am also cursed.’ At that point I knew it was perfect casting.”

International remakes

Commissioned by Nelonen and its streamer Ruutu, Supporting Actor is the first project from the newly formed Banijay Finland. The indie brought all its local outposts — Endemol Shine Finland, Banijay Finland, and Jarowskij — under one banner last year. But consolidation didn’t require much change, Malka says. 

“We were already all sitting in the same office. It didn’t affect anything. It really just allowed us to find ways of being more efficient at a time when things are becoming more challenging in the global industry,” Malka says. 

In a rather cathartic ending (SPOILER ALERT), Supporting Actor season one concludes with Aki and the audience discovering the origins of his curse. But by the final ep, the show has bloomed in so many directions that the story could comfortably continue onto a second season. 

Lindgren says he and Malka have already been exchanging ideas. The pair are also eyeing a series of international remakes.

“There has been a lot of excitement and interest in the project, even from before we went into the shoot, just because the pitch is so easy to understand and imagine,” Malka says. “We are currently in talks with producers in four different continents about possible adaptations.” Deadline is told interested parties include producers from other European markets, Africa, and Asia.

Malka says the show was the first project she optioned in 2019 when she joined Endemol Shine Finland to launch the scripted department. She says it’s the perfect example of the work she aims to create at the company.

“We want to make highly entertaining, high-quality projects for large local audiences, but with international appeal,” she says. “I’m not looking for projects that are too niche or too local and can’t travel or feel universal.”

The secret ingredient to making Supporting Actor a lasting and global scripted format, Malka continues, is its mystical elements.

“You can adapt it with local stars and incorporate the different belief systems in every country and every culture,” she says.

With time, we’ll see if she’s right.

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