William Spetz on Creating, Writing, and Starring in Netflix Series TORE
The show touches on grief, family, LGBTQIA+ identity, mental health, and community.
Growing up in northern Sweden, William Spetz has loved theater and acting for as long as he can remember. He vividly remembers stealing his family’s camcorder in the early 2000s and became obsessed with making and editing movies. Not long after learning the ins and outs of filming, he turned the camera around and became the star.
Spetz created, wrote, and starred in TORE, a Swedish dark comedy series that premiered last fall. Directed by Erica Calmeyer, the series follows Tore, a 27-year-old who lost his father and attempts to forget it ever happened. However, suppressed feelings catch up to him, and he spirals. Tore is still soul-searching and looking to find his true identity and purpose in life — all while grieving his father. By day, he works at his father’s funeral home, which doesn’t help him cope with his loss. By night, he experiments with queer nightlife and clubbing as a distraction. While struggling to be stable, Tore is also on a bumpy road with his lifestyle and relationships. When he meets a florist named Erik and a drag queen named Shady Meat, he begins to see the finer side of life as he figures it all out.
“This came to life from getting another ‘no,’” Spetz says. “I was creatively heartbroken from another project. I moved to Stockholm after high school and started writing plays. I played smaller parts in TV and film in Sweden. I had a passion for writing my own stuff because I’m a writer, too.”
Despite hardships and rejection, Spetz says the failure of the unfinished project led to the creative endeavor that is TORE. He began feeling hopeless in his career but didn’t let impostor syndrome stop him. Instead, he took it as a sign that he needed to venture out and create something by himself, for himself.
“Being a part of the whole process was so magical,” he says. “I started writing it on my own because I didn’t want to be dependent on anyone else. I wanted to find my way back to my passion. I didn’t think about all of the things you need to think about. I didn’t think about the genre, network, or target audience. I wrote TORE because I wanted to return to the feeling I had when I was 14. Ironically enough, that’s this project.”
Tore’s character has a certain relatability that almost feels like it’s portraying Spetz’s real-life experiences. However, Tore is far from the character he character he created. Every character, scene, and story is fictional, which Spetz found more manageable to achieve than portraying someone who is actually like him.
“He reflects the person I don’t want to be,” Spetz says. “As an actor, there’s always a double standard of not wanting to be in a bad situation, but if I were, how would I justify reacting like this? As a writer and even more as an actor, there’s a Swedish expression: ‘You dig where you stand.’ You always pick from your own experiences. I feel very close to Tore in many ways, making a fool out of myself before my crushes and the sense of being uncomfortable sitting with your pain and anxiety.”
Like most of us, Tore is known to run away from his feelings to get through the day. A pattern throughout TORE is that Tore and the other characters dissociate and desensitize to cope. But throughout the show, it’s clear that that is not a healthy or beneficial tactic to be stable. He emphasizes that although not efficient, not being okay, yet being functional can coexist. Initially, Spetz found it challenging to play such a cathartic role. While there were some similarities to Spetz and Tore, Spetz says his life was simple in comparison.
“You need to remove the distance between you and the character because you’re not fully going into it,” he says. “Shooting the show was emotionally hard because Tore is a character full of resistance. He’s constantly running away and physically resisting emotional contact with people in his life. I feel like that struck a nerve with me because that’s how I am when I have anxiety or am in pain. Unlike the movies, when you do all these emotional things and have this intelligent monologue, it’s the opposite. It’s the resistance.”
Luckily, Calmeyer made space for Spetz to take risks and make mistakes to embody Tore’s character as well as possible. Whether it took one take or five, they didn’t want the character, nor the show, to be overthought. Once they reached that freedom, it no longer felt like acting for Spetz. He says that although it’s fiction, his body cannot tell the difference.
Spetz wants viewers to feel that they can identify with any of the characters throughout the show. He wants people to know that people get lonely but assures them that they are not alone. “Loneliness is a big part of many people’s lives,” he says. “I feel like we’re all so lonely, even if we have so many friends and so many people around us. If you watch the show, find some solace in that.”
