Today's director of our Female Filmmakers series is a powerhouse. This European writer and director has won Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys, and more. She is behind so many of our favorite nude scenes, so let's talk about the one and only Susanne Bier!
Ms. Bier comes from Copenhagen where she studied at the Danish School of Film and graduated in 1987. She began her career directing music videos before she pivoted to a feature film that meant a lot to her. Her first film was Freud Leaving Home, a 1991 Swedish dramedy about a Jewish mother celebrating her 60th birthday. This clearly personal film for Bier delivers bush from its lead actress, an adult daughter who still lives at home. Living at home doesn't stop her from going nude!
After the Wedding is a 2006 film that earned her A LOT of acclaim. It starred Mads Mikkelsen as a humanitarian in India running an orphanage that is struggling to stay afloat. He does shady business with a businessman who wants Mads to go to his daughter's wedding in exchange for help. Sounds like a decent deal right? WRONG! He gets there and realizes he recognizes that man's wife and things are about to get complicated!
The babes in this movie are Stine Fischer Christensen and Sidse Babett Knudsen - and both of them are gorgeous. Susanne Bier knows how to cast a hot babe!
The 2002 film Open Hearts is part of the Dogma 95 movement which we highlighted earlier this week during our Staff Picks. It was basically a movement in the Scandinavian film world that believes in minimalist filmmaking: handheld camera, no special effects, limited music (if any), and naturalistic acting. Susanne made one of the better films in the brief genre with this drama starring Mads Mikkelsen as a married man who becomes obsessed with a young woman whose loser is paralyzed. The drama!
Sonja Richter plays the young woman and Paprika Steen stars as a spicy woman. Sonja is sexy in her affair scene on the floor with Mads in which she gets naked underneath him. Open Hearts will have you opening your pants!
After hits like these, it was no wonder that Susanne was able to direct some of Hollywood's hottest stars in major movies. She directed Halle Berry in 2007's Things We Lost in the Fire in which Halle is a widow who gets entangled with her dead husband's best friend after inviting him to move in with them. She didn't lose nearly enough of her clothes in that fire, but there is a nipslip in one hot Halle scene! Thank you berry much!
She won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for her 2010 film In a Better World. In a Better World, there is definitely sexiness from Danish dame Trine Dyrholm. We have seen Trine in other Scando films where her hot body is always a scandal! She didn't go nude here, but I am always happy to see her.
We know and love her best for directing six episodes of the mini-series The Undoing! That meant that Susanne was responsible for Nicole Kidman and Matilda de Angelis' sexy locker room nudity. Their clothes were undone and Ms. Bier made sure we saw it. She has done a great deal of work lately on mini-series and she handles starlets' nudity very well, from Nicole to Elizabeth Debicki.
She had a major meme-able hit in 2018 with the Netflix original film Bird Box. Sandra Bullock starred in this popular thriller - most famous for Sandra and her kids being blindfolded as they run to safety. While they are doing that, Rosa Salazar is getting totally naked as she has sex in a very dark scene. It is dark, but we see some side boob!
What is Susanne Bier going to do next? Well, I don't know, but I have no doubt that it will be worth the wait. Her last project was 2022's The First Lady. There was no nudity in that mini-series, but that doesn't stop us from calling Susanne Bier The First Lady of Danish Sex Scenes.
