NETFLIX UNVEILS SWEDISH ORIGINAL “THE UNLIKELY MURDERER”

Netflix announced its Swedish original, “The Unlikely Murderer,” a five-part limited series based on the award-winning book “The Unlikely Murderer” from 2018 written by Thomas Pettersson. It will launch on Netflix in 2021. ”This gripping and challenging case has intrigued people both in Sweden as well as in the rest of the world for more than 34 years,” Tesha Crawford, Director Nordics Original Series at Netflix said. “We are therefore very excited to bring Thomas Pettersson’s book to life, together with our long-term partners FLX. With Charlotte as the conceptual director and Wilhelm and Niklas writing, we have a really strong creative team and I can’t wait to introduce this Swedish series to the world.”     

Swedish actor Robert Gustafsson will play the lead role as Stig Engström. Joining Robert Gustafsson are Eva Melander, Mikael Persbrandt, and Peter Andersson. The cast also includes Joel Spira, Emil Almén, Shanti Roney, Torkel Petterson, Henrik Norlén, Lia Boysen, Magnus Krepper, Björn Bengtsson, Peter Viitanen, and Cilla Thorell. “It's an exciting challenge and a great responsibility to portray Stig Engström, but also, in a way, a form of therapy,” Gustafsson said. "Since I was at the same cinema as Olof Palme on the night of the murder, this case has always felt like an abscess that never disappears, and I'm not alone in feeling that.”

The Swedish language series will be produced by Fatima Varhos and Frida Asp and executively produced by Pontus Edgren from FLX. The scriptwriters for the series are Wilhelm Behrman and Niklas Rockström and Charlotte Brändström is the conceptual director.

The Swedish drama series is a fictional interpretation of how Stig Engström, the graphic designer who was named as the probable murderer of Sweden's prime minister Olof Palme, managed to elude justice right up to his death through a combination of audacity, luck, and a perplexed police force. What do we know about Stig Engström? How could the police let him get away, despite being on his track? The murder was not planned well, Engström did everything wrong from the beginning and almost no one believed his lies about what he did during that fateful night in 1986 in Stockholm, Sweden. “The series is a powerful character study and poses a serious and credible hypothesis regarding the man who most likely killed Palme on that snowy winter night when the Prime Minister left a cinema in central Stockholm and was walking home,” Charlotte Brändström said. “The very fact that Sweden’s head of government could, back then, live like any other citizen and eschewed chauffeur-driven vehicles or bodyguards in favor of public transport speaks to a now lost innocence in our national life.”