EXCLUSIVE: When the Soviet Whiskey-class submarine U137 ran aground in Sweden in 1981, it sparked a diplomatic dispute that threatened to start an international conflict. With the possibility of nuclear weapons at stake, it was no laughing matter. The team behind Whiskey with icea satirical version of the Cold War subdrama, they disagree.
“Whiskey with ice “joking about something as serious as when we were on the brink of a third world war, and it’s absolutely the right thing to do because the world needs more humor and self-awareness, not less,” Jonas Jonasson, the Swedish author of ‘The “A Man a hundred years old who jumped out the window and disappeared,” he says exclusively for Deadline.
He wrote a unique story, of which Whiskey with ice has been falsified. The next six-part series was predicted by Deadline to be successful in its European dramas to watch in 2025. It arrived on SVT over the festive period, generating big numbers for the Swedish public broadcaster. It is also the first Nordic original for Disney+ and launches on the streaming platform in the EMEA region (except MENA and Türkiye) on January 22. In the US, it is released on Hulu.
The 1981 incident turned already tense East-West relations and tested Sweden’s impartial position. Their prime minister, Thorbjörn Fälldin, played by Rolf Lassgård in the series, ordered his forces to hold the border with Russia. Jonasson remembers the drama of today’s world: “The underwater days in October 1981 were in every way as real as they were surreal. I was 20 years old then and I remember how an entire nation and half the world held their breath for 10 whole days.”
Swedish actor Rolf Lassgård plays Swedish leader Thorbjörn Fälldin
SVT, Disney+
The team that created the series includes several of those who brought ‘The Hundred Year Old Man Who Jumped Out of the Window’ to the big screen in 2013, including prolific European television drama producer Patrick Nebout and Whiskey with ice screenwriter and executive producer Henrik Jansson-Schweizer. They produce the show under the banner Humanoids.
The initial plan was a straight drama, but it didn’t work, explains Jansson-Schweizer. “We have Brezhnev, who was senile and alcoholic; Ronald Reagan, who was the new president at the time; and we had NATO. In the middle, we had a submarine that had washed ashore just a stone’s throw from Sweden’s largest naval base, and there was a Swedish Prime Minister who was a sheep farmer and didn’t speak a word of English. Try to make a thriller out of it. “It’s impossible.”
“We couldn’t really crack the code until Patrick called me one day and said, ‘Hey, how about a skit?’”
The resulting series establishes its satirical skills from the beginning. In the first installment, two Swedish fishermen reflect (very) slowly on the fact that a huge foreign submarine has crashed on their coast. Cut to President Reagan sporting a cowboy hat and enjoying target practice, using targets emblazoned with Leonid Brezhnev’s face. Meanwhile, the Soviet leader sinks bottles of vodka, almost always forgetting who he is talking to.
A TV show about the 1980s crisis posed modern production challenges. Labor strikes in the US meant producers looked to the UK for their Ronald Reagan, with British actor Mark Noble playing the POTUS. There is an all-Lithuanian cast for the Russian characters, led by Kestutis Stasys Jakstas as Brezhnev.
Lithuanian actor Kestutis Stasys Jakstas plays Leonid Brezhnev
SVT, Disney+
The series is about power, diplomacy and politics, but the team was decidedly impartial. “We’re not pointing fingers,” explains director Björn Stein. “Swedes, Russians, Americans… there are idiots everywhere. We don’t have a political point of view with this. It’s more like men with power repeatedly abuse it, and diplomacy is the way to go. “That is what we are communicating.”
The absurd elements work because they ring true, at least for the most part. “This series is inspired by a current story,” proclaims a disclaimer at the beginning of each episode, with the following warning: “Some characters and locations have been altered for reasons of national security. Quite a few to be honest…”
The balancing act for the producers was to lean on the humor but also deliver the necessary high-stakes drama. The scenes inside the submarine or the military mobilizing for battle have the necessary dramatic touch. The director found a method to keep the thriller elements exciting.
Stein says: “The thought occurred to me: ‘What if we don’t tell the director of photography, we don’t tell the set designer, we don’t tell anyone that this is supposed to be fun?’ Of course, we told him later, but we wanted his mentality and approach to be the same as in a traditional spy thriller. By using this visible language, we can go from the fun parts to the exciting parts without changing costumes, so to speak.”
With East-West relations strained once again and a plethora of global crises looming or developing, Whiskey with ice It is a show about the past that talks about the present.
Jonasson is “proud and happy that the series is being shown around the world.” If the show gets space in the Kremlin, the White House and beyond, so much the better. “I hope Putin, Trump and everyone else sees, laughs and takes it seriously,” says the author.
