'I certainly wouldn't choose it myself' – Sofia Helin, star of The Bridge, on Saga Norén's 1977 Porsche 911S

It’s difficult to tell who is the bigger star of Scandi noir TV drama The Bridge: the beautiful Sofia Helin, or the olive-green Porsche 911S driven by her character Saga Norén? Moments before the latter sold for £125,000 at the Bonhams auction at Goodwood Festival of Speed, I spoke to Sofia and the show’s producer Anders Landström about working with modern television’s most famous car. Was it the chance to drive a 911S that convinced her to take the role?

“I didn’t even know about the car before I was brought in,” admits Sofia. “They had gone through a very long pre-production period, and Saga’s world had been created around me. I stepped into the room and there it was, including the car. They didn’t give me much warning.

“I wasn’t keen on the yellow. The costume designer rushed up to me when I arrived and started holding up clothes that were the same colour as the car. Mustard. I couldn’t believe it.”

The Porsche’s jaundiced paintwork – officially Jager Grün, or hunter green – is emblematic of the programme’s washed-out, cheerless aesthetic. Saga’s universe is grey-brown and relentlessly deadly, like the final ten minutes of Get Carter but set in Malmo and Copenhagen; her car stands out among the pallid, unhappy humans she associates with. Anders describes it as “the colour for the whole series”.

“At one point I saw in the production plans that the overall goal for the artistic departments was to make everyone look pale, yellow and sickly,” explains Sofia.

So how did they decide that a 1977 Porsche 911S finished in Jager Grün would help them achieve this goal? It’s certainly an unusual car, in an even more unusual colour. Surely it took months or even years to find one?

“Not at all,” says Anders. “We knew we wanted something different, something special, but we didn’t have anything in mind. Then one day one of the production team saw the car driving past, realised it was the one, and stopped the driver. We bought the car for something like £7,000.”

There are a lot of people in the Bonhams tent who would pay that much just to drive it around the block. What was it like behind the wheel?

“Tricky,” confesses Sofia. “The production team suggested I take a few lessons initially, but I had a one-year-old at the time and was too busy. So I got in the car and had a go, thinking it wouldn’t be too hard. At the end of the day the production team really insisted that I take some lessons. I got used to it in the end.

“One day, the door fell off. It got fixed very quickly though, the crew loved this car.”

Parting with such a machine can be difficult. Saga Norén, Länskrim Malmö, wouldn’t think twice about such a sale, but is Sofia as glad to see the back of it?

“Driving it, perhaps,” she laughs. “It was strange – I hadn’t seen it for a whole, but as soon as I sat it it today and smelled the leather, I felt very nostalgic all of a sudden. But it’s not my thing at all.

“If I could choose anything it would be a Tesla, which is about as different to the 911 as you can get. I’ve never driven one but I have ridden as a passenger and just think they are amazingly cool. They’re also environmentally friendly, which is what’s important to me.”

Her statement sits at odds with the event that surrounds us; screaming cylinders are being sent up Goodwood’s hillclimb in groups of eight and twelve, filling the countryside with noise and smoke. Almost everybody has arrived in something thirsty, and it’s always the most expensive, the rarest and the loudest that draw the biggest crowd. British car culture is quite particular, and I’m whether the Swedish scene is similar. Anders shakes his head.

“It’s nothing like this. I can’t believe some of the things that I’ve seen here today. We don’t have many people who drive super fast, super flashy cars. It’s rare to see them on the road.”

“There’s just one very well-known actor in Sweden who is really into cars,” says Sofia. “Everyone knows him when they see him; he wants to be seen. That’s quite unusual for us.

“The Swedes think that we shouldn’t be ‘seen’ too much. We are quite humble people, we don’t feel that we should be ostentatious.”

A tall Scandinavian man approaches Sofia and whispers in her ear. She grins.

“He just told me that he is going to bid up to £80,000. I can’t believe it – we can do so much good with this money.”

Proceeds from the sale will go to WaterAid, a charity for which Sofia is an ambassador. The London-based international NGO provides disadvantaged people with safe drinking water, as well as building sanitation facilities and educating communities on hygiene. It’s clearly a matter close to Sofia’s heart.

“A tenth of people around the world live without access to clean water. A fifth live without any sort of sanitation at all. Eight hundred children die every day as a result of this, but it affects us all – especially the women who are sent to collect the water, who endure labour without clean water, who have no sanitation to deal with their periods, and so on.

“Young girls have to stay at home to cook and clean rather than get an education, but that becomes less time-consuming when they have access to clean water. It halves the time. And the women in these areas can’t get an education or a job so they become a ‘burden’ on the home, leading to underage marriages and other social problems.

“I decided to help WaterAid because water is a basic need. It sounds silly, but water brings peace. It allows us to create a level playing field, then begin to solve other issues.”

Sofia is visibly excited by this prospect, and the Porsche’s journey from a film set in Malmo to an auction in a field in West Sussex begins to make more sense. But how did they decide what to do with the car when filming was over? Whose idea was it to donate it to charity?

“We had been talking about it for a while,” said Anders. “About what to do with the Porsche. Nobody really knew what to do! It more or less started as a joke, but we kept talking and thinking about how we could use the car’s fame for a good cause. Thanks to the unexpected success of the show, we have really increased its value.”

“Everyone was very supportive,” explained Sofia. “Nobody wanted to keep the money for the company, and we all wanted to support a good cause. The whole team has been very enthusiastic.”

The tall Scandinavian man was true to his word, but ultimately was outbid by around £45,000. The car sold for £125,000 – to a British man who claimed never to have seen The Bridge.

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