In 2021, Sofia Helin wrote herself a note and stuck it on the wall of her home office. “Be in your own force,” it read. “Don’t go into anyone else’s power. Be your own.” At the time, the actor – star of the iconic Scandi-noir crime drama The Bridge – was angry. The Swedish #MeToo movement, which Helin helped to launch, was foundering. Sweden’s complex libel laws meant that women were being charged with defamation after naming the men who had allegedly abused them.

When the movement started in 2017, Helin had trusted in the Swedish system. Surely Sweden – a bulwark of liberal feminism, ranked fifth in the world by the World Economic Forum for gender equality – would deliver the justice women so desperately craved. Instead of demanding heads on a pike, Helin and her fellow organisers backed an open letter and campaign calling for reform, staging a public reading of anonymous testimonies from abused and harassed women. “In theory,” says Helin, “it’s very sympathetic not to mention people and bring them out, like we did in the middle ages, to hang them publicly and so on. It’s very modern and kind.” The few women who did name names paid a stiff price: to date, at least 12 women have been prosecuted for defamation related to #MeToo cases, among them actor Cissi Wallin, convicted in 2019 after naming a journalist she claimed had raped her. The man denies the allegation.

“The rage hurt me so much,” says Helin. “I suffered for my rage.” Her anger was, in part, at her own naivety. “I realised the hope we had was not realistic,” she says, “and that people don’t give a shit about things, as long as they can make money from it. I also realised that I need to stop being surprised by the same shit.”

Something else Helin has realised over the years, she says, “is how different Sweden is from other countries, and that also mirrors the way we arranged the #MeToo movement in Sweden. We believed that with trust and working together we’d be able to change something, but it didn’t work out as I hoped it would.”

There were warning signs. In 2019, Helin met the actor Rosanna Arquette, who has been at the forefront of the US movement, at a dinner at the Stockholm film festival. “She couldn’t get her head around why we were doing this,” Helin laughs. “She was like, ‘and they go free? What’s your fucking plan?’”

Now, Helin thinks Arquette may have been right. “When I look at it now,” Helin questions, “I wonder, did we try to approach a very dirty subject without touching the dirt?”

For Helin, stepping into her own force means taking solace in her work. “The way to breathe through these years has been creating Lust,” she says. She is referring to her latest show, an HBO comedy about four middle-aged women and their sex lives, which she co-created. Today, as we speak on Zoom, Helin is wearing an oversized Lust-branded sweatshirt bearing the motto “Sex is the Highway to Health”, the name of the first episode. Helin stars as Anette, a researcher investigating a link between the sex lives and wellbeing of middle-aged women, while reluctantly confronting the reality of her own sexless marriage. “I’m a parent,” says Helin of her role, “I’ve been working hard, I have a long marriage behind me, I have several friends with the same experience. I think it’s a universal theme that happens to many people.”

Lust is frequently hilarious and explicit. Between them, Anette and her best friends Nadia (Anja Lundqvist), Ellen (Julia Dufvenius) and Martina (Elin Klinga) have illicit relationships with fitness-bro personal trainers, go to couple’s therapy, and, in one particularly memorable scene, a character accidentally throws a vibrator at their toddler.

“Lust came from a creative lust to work with some colleagues of mine,” says Helin. “We explored what subjects we want to dive into and realised that we can’t talk with each other about our sex lives, and that’s probably the same for people around the world.” Helin and her fellow co-creators Lundqvist, Dufvenius, Åsa Kalmér and the lone man Frans Milisic Wiklund sat on her living room floor, brainstorming. Around the same time, in July 2016, the Swedish ministry of health and social affairs announced that it would be carrying out a national survey on sexuality. It felt serendipitous, and Helin and her colleagues created the character of Anette in response.

But there are serious themes beyond the shagging, which is unsurprising given that Dufvenius, Lundqvist and Helin were all involved in the Swedish #MeToo movement. Anette is sexually harassed at work, and discouraged from reporting it by her supervisor. Martina’s husband leaves her for a much younger woman, and she writes a feminist memoir in response. “I think you say it best in Britain,” Helin responds. “You have to laugh about things or you’ll jump off a bridge.”

I’m interested to know how Helin reconciles her feminist views with the explosion of gory crime dramas featuring violence against women, prompted, in part, by the phenomenal success of shows such as The Bridge, in which she played the detective Saga Norén. “Violence against women is not something that is entertainment for me,” Helin says, “but I don’t just see it in crime dramas.” She points out that Scandi noir doesn’t have a monopoly on violence against women: “If you look at any Greek drama, they kill each other.” Training at the Calle Flygare theatre school in Stockholm in the 90s, Helin remembers actors rushing home to watch the British police procedural drama Prime Suspect, starring Helen Mirren. “I think crime for us in Sweden came from the UK,” she says.

When The Bridge was screened in 2011, Helin’s performance was celebrated for bringing an autistic character to a wider audience. (The makers neither confirmed nor denied that Saga was autistic.) But recent years have seen able-bodied or neurotypical actors slammed for playing disabled or neurodivergent characters: in 2019, Bryan Cranston defended playing a wheelchair user in The Upside, while the musical movie Music, released in 2021 and starring neurotypical performer Maddie Ziegler as a teenager with autism, also received criticism from some within the autistic community. “My job is to be a chameleon,” says Helin of the debate. “That’s what I love about doing it. So, just as the world should be free, actors should be free to do whatever parts they want to do.”

Helin is a charming, candid presence and so anxious for my opinion on Lust or #MeToo that at times our discussion feels less like an interview and more like a conversation between friends. She is unpretentious, despite the fact that she has achieved national treasure status in Sweden, thanks largely to the runaway success of The Bridge, as well as the Emmy-winning second world war series Atlantic Crossing, in which she starred and also executive produced. She only had to mention Lust to producer Sandra Harms at a party – “not really sober,” Helin laughs – for it to be made.

Was she concerned that her involvement in #MeToo might bring her professional repercussions? “If someone wants to blacklist me, I don’t want to work with that person anyway,” Helin says. She wasn’t always so confident, but times of struggle have at least offered inspiration to draw upon, she says. “As an actor, that’s my bank: having failed and experienced terrible things – that’s where I get everything from. Also being a woman – for example, I’ve never visited Hollywood, I’ve never been to LA, because I realised that’s a place you can be torn to pieces as a woman. I also felt this very big pressure that if I would ever try to be in that arena, you have to be a perfect beauty. And before #MeToo, I would get the weirdest questions about my scar, and why I don’t get rid of it.” She is referring to her facial scar from a cycling accident when she was 24.

On another occasion, a British journalist interviewing Helin asked why Saga wasn’t thinner. “I froze,” she says, “[mouth] wide open. I wasn’t prepared for that kind of question. Then I thought afterwards, ‘I should have answered: I didn’t know that Saga Norén was also anorexic.’ But I’m a normal woman, so it also felt like a vulnerable spot.” When she was 35, a director told her that she had to hurry up and get to Hollywood, because she only had five more years to go in her career. “So in that sense,” says Helin, now 49, “it’s such a relief to be on the other side.”

She is planning a second series of Lust, as well as a project about “a woman of my age from the 12th century who was a revolutionary, a holy person, a total fuck up – she started her revolution when she was 55 years old.” Helin says it’s too early in this “gigantic project” to name the woman, but that she is drawn to projects and stories where there’s “an unanswered question”. For Atlantic Crossing, in which she played the real-life Crown Princess Martha of Norway as she navigated the personal and professional to build a diplomatic relationship with Franklin D Roosevelt during the second world war, this unanswered question was “how you lead your country and what are a leader’s responsibilities?”

With Anette in Lust, Helin’s question is, why, when she is one of the most in-demand researchers in the country, she is unable to articulate her sexual desire to her husband, or impose house rules on her teenage daughter. Helin has seen many Anettes among the women around her. “[Their] biggest fear is to take up the space,” she says. “They already have the space, but they don’t own it, because they are so shaken by the [gender-defined] roles they are allowed to play as women.” Helin admits that she was once this woman, too. “I can recognise that a lot within myself,” she says. “It’s much easier to take a step back than to own the space.”

Helin believes Swedish social norms compound this sense of disenfranchisement – such as the law of Jante, which is taught to every child in school, and upholds that nobody is better or more special than anyone else. “So for the ones who succeed in Sweden,” says Helin, “they should really keep their head down because that’s something to be a little bit ashamed of, taking so much space. It’s very typical Swedish.” After the overwhelming success of The Bridge, Helin struggled to cope with international fame, a punishing workload and raising two children. “I was pushed out of my orbit,” she says. She coped by withdrawing into herself, keeping her head down and getting on with things.

Then the #MeToo movement happened and, for a while, Helin hoped the situation would improve for Swedish women and girls. She had her own story, although she has never spoken about it publicly. She wouldn’t rule it out, though. “Maybe,” she says. “If I have a reason.”

After initial hope, Helin watched the movement evaporate, as woman after woman fell silent. Unlike in the UK, where truth is the ultimate defence against a libel suit, in Sweden, before defendants get a chance to prove that their statements are true, they must prove that it was in the public interest to publish them. “It’s very interesting,” says Helin drily, “with the system in Sweden, where you can be prosecuted for telling your truth, even if it is true, [and] even if you can prove it’s true.” The man who Wallin alleged raped her was not deemed a public enough figure to justify publishing the allegations so whether they were true or not was never considered by the court. That is not to say that Wallin would have otherwise won the case – after she reported the alleged incident to the police in 2011, they decided there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute.

An earlierblow to the movement took place in 2018, when Benny Fredriksson, formerly head of the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern (the Stockholm arts and culture centre), killed himself. He had been accused of sexual misconduct and pressuring a woman into an abortion, although investigators found no evidence to support these claims and the newspaper that published the initial allegations retracted some of its reporting. Fredriksson’s death hardened public opinion against #MeToo, and several high-profile figures, including the actor Noomi Rapace and the novelist Lotta Lundberg, subsequently distanced themselves from the movement. “That was super-scary for people,” says Helin. “Most people don’t want to hurt anyone like that.”

Helin is at pains to emphasise that the movement wasn’t a total bust. “It also worked in many ways,” she says. “Many bosses here really try to make a change to keep their employees safe. The problem is that it’s a very slow way of changing things and businesses abroad don’t have a clue about the potentially dysfunctional people that we export from Sweden. It’s like sending out loose cannons to international productions.”

For now, Helin has decided, “My best activism [is] just to keep working … that’s where I’m the best.” Last year was a turning point: the note on the wall, the decision to step into her power, after a lifetime of contorting herself into a more acceptable frame of being. “I can say and do whatever I want,” she says. “Whenever I want. So that’s a new kind of freedom for me. I’m not going to go into that scared state of mind.” It is a newfound devil-may-care attitude, and one that will reap dividends for audiences in Sweden and around the world. “The doors are so wide open to my ideas, to stories, to opportunities,” Helin says, with a glint in her eye. “I feel like my life has started in a new way. I’ve never been this confident or enthusiastic, or felt so free.”

Sofia Helin is starring in Lust, available worldwide now on HBO Max