A Guide To All The Major Players In HBO’s The Investigation

HBO’s The Investigation focuses on an international true crime story that’s familiar to many: the murder of Swedish journalist Kim Wall. In August 2017, Wall boarded a homemade submarine created by Peter Madsen, a Danish entrepreneur and inventor. She was working on a story about the submarine, and intended to only have a brief interview. Instead, Wall was reported missing and the submarine sank the next day. Over the next few months, divers discovered her body parts, and Madsen was eventually convicted for her murder.

The Investigation follows the, well, investigation of Wall’s murder, but not in the “usual” way one would expect a true crime series to. Madsen doesn’t appear in the series whatsoever, and instead of centering on the grisly murder the series is tasked with showing the tireless work of police, divers, and prosecutors to bring justice to Wall’s family.

“I didn’t want to do a cliched story about the struggle between good and evil, and all the iterations of that,” Tobias Lindholm, the series’ director, wrote in The Guardian.

Many of the characters that appear in The Investigation, from Wall’s parents to Copenhagen’s homicide chief, Jens Møller Jensen (Søren Malling) are based on their real-life counterparts. One minor, albeit very good character, the Walls’ dog Iso, even plays herself. (“Joachim [Wall] insisted,” Lindholm wrote in The Guardian.)

Click ahead to see who plays who in The Investigation, and just how they compare to the real investigators in the Kim Wall case.