Dominic Hensel reveals his father took his own life when he was thirteen.
1. Värvet re-airs episode 86 from August 2013 as part of the podcast's 700th episode celebration, featuring Swedish-Czech actor and comedian Dominic Hensel.
2. Dominic Hensel is the guest — an actor known from Solsidan and the film G, and a stand-up comedian; host Kristoffer Triumf conducts the interview in Vällingby in early August 2013.
3. The episode's core question is how Hensel's Czech refugee background, his father's suicide, and inherited depression have shaped who he is as a person and a parent.
4. Hensel was born in Prague 2 (Vinohrady) and his earliest memory is at the family's country house outside Prague, where he watched his grandmother chop a snake into pieces with an axe.
5. When Soviet tanks entered Prague in August 1968 as part of suppressing the Prague Spring, Hensel's mother, brother, and grandmother fled on the last official train to Austria, where his father was working as a stage assistant at a theater in Vienna.
6. His grandmother had a panic attack at the Austrian border, and the family ultimately chose Sweden over Switzerland and Canada because Sweden was felt to be closer to home.
7. The family arrived in Sweden as refugees, staying first at a camp in Alvesta, then Västerhaninge, and eventually moving to a four-room flat on Östermalm in Stockholm.
8. Hensel grew up on Skeppargatan 55 in the same block as Carl Bildt, across from a cinema-slash-theater-slash-porn club called Fågelblå, and spent his childhood exploring Östermalm rooftops and park areas around Karlaplan.
9. His father, who had worked as a wig-maker's assistant at Dramaten (the Royal Dramatic Theatre), died by suicide when Dominic was thirteen-and-a-half.
10. Hensel has few memories of his father — mostly visual: how his father looked when angry, how he laughed, how he laced Dominic's skates before a skating session Dominic always hated.
11. He describes discovering a tape recording from childhood in which his father speaks Czech, and being struck that his father's vocal tone was exactly his own.
12. When Dominic himself reached the age at which his father died, and had two sons of his own — the same number his father had — he experienced what he calls 'magical thinking' and describes sitting on a tram a few blocks from where his father died.
13. He calls surviving past that age his 'zero point' and a 'half-time notice,' after which he felt it became possible to think thoughts he had never dared to complete before.
14. Hensel describes inheriting his father's bipolar tendencies — not the most severe form, but a pattern of very high and very low mood states that he has developed mechanisms to manage.
15. His main coping strategy is not acting when he recognises he is in a 'defective' state and feels the urge to withdraw and hide from others, particularly when he might deploy what he calls his 'verbal scythe.'
16. He describes a serious mental health crisis ten years before the interview when his long-term partner, mother of his two eldest sons, finally left — a loss he had partly seen coming but refused to process for years.
17. During that crisis, he deliberately chose not to take antidepressants, wanting to experience the thoughts and feelings that emerged rather than dull them, and found the period productive despite the pain.
18. The interview is conducted in a quiet, exploratory register; Triumf is largely receptive, asking follow-up questions without steering, and Hensel speaks at length in a reflective, self-aware tone.
19. Listeners interested in mental health, fatherhood, immigration history, and the psychology of creative professionals will find this episode substantive.
20. Listeners who prefer lighter entertainment conversations, or who do not speak Swedish, will find this episode difficult to access.
