While he would be too modest to say it, Iceland’s current cultural heft owes more than a little to Kjartansson himself. It really felt like this place at the end of the world, and you were like, “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to be a proper country?” It was a land with an inferiority complex a kind of megalomania.’ Born to actor parents in 1976, over the course of his lifetime Kjartansson has seen Iceland transition from Arctic Circle backwater to Nordic arts powerhouse. The Reykjavik where he grew up in the 1980s was, he says, ‘pretty bleak. ‘I remember it so well when my parents and my grandparents’ generation were all about creating an identity for this country,’ Kjartansson told me earlier. In the years before the country became an independent republic in 1944, Samuelsson became its state architect, although it has clearly taken more than one master builder to forge a concrete sense of Icelandic-ness. (He was brought up Protestant but, given how few Catholics there were at the time, nobody was in a position to be picky.) The imposing structure combines Gothic Revival with trappings of an art deco vernacular largely dreamed up by its architect, Gudjon Samuelsson (1887–1950). And then we’re on our way again, up Ægisgata towards the Catholic cathedral, where Kjartansson volunteered as an altar boy. Everyone collapses into laughter and trades a few back-slaps.
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