As Black Sands comes to an end on Viaplay, series star and co-creator Aldis Amah Hamilton is looking back on the Icelandic crime drama with a sense of accomplishment, but also a sense of closure. The critically acclaimed thriller continues to leave audiences on the edge of their seat in Season 2, but there’s also no doubt that it put her character Anita Elínardóttir through the wringer—along with pretty much everyone else.

Aldis joined TVBrittanyF.com to look back on the end of Black Sands, both as its star and one of its creative forces. She spoke about why it was always the plan to conclude the series after two seasons, and what it was like to say goodbye. Plus, she revealed the moments, ideas and characters that she loved across the show’s run and teased her future projects.

Brittany Frederick: Black Sands is obviously very significant in your career, not only as an actor but also as a writer. What was it like for you simply to walk away from the show and know it was done?

Aldis Amah Hamilton: That’s the funny part about all of this. It’s been done for a while for me. We finished the script in 2022 and we shot in 2023, so it’s been a minute—but honestly, when it was done, it surprised me how ready I was to let go. Even going into Season 2, we just knew we were only going to do it as a two halves thing, so we were never thinking, hopefully we’ll continue, and then at the end we didn’t. When we were done, I knew we were done.

I was fully expecting I might just break down crying or something, but I was ready to let this go. It’s a very heavy story. It was a heavy story to write, it was a heavy story to portray… I got what I wanted out of it. I hope others did too. And I still keep all my friends; I still keep all my memories. I work with these people all the time still. So funnily enough, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

You’ve touched on something that’s both great and challenging about the show: it’s very heavy. It doesn’t flinch from hard topics or conversations. How did you live in that space as both an actor and a writer?

I almost feel apologetic sometimes to have created something so dark in this world we live in. [Laughs.] But I will say I think it’s so important to open up the wound and disinfect it and cleanse it, and this is the only way to do it. We need to have these really intense conversations, and we need to face these really ugly truths that not everyone is going to go through.

For example, motherhood—Mother’s Day, that’s a very difficult day for a lot of people, and we just need to look at the fact that not everyone is going to have such a wonderful experience, especially people who are extremely traumatized… There are so many ways this can go wrong, and we don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to face it. So, with that in mind, it was so important to all of the creators to tell a story that just shed some light on something problematic.

That gave me strength in a weird way, Every time you write about something difficult, in particular, you are also facing yourself in a way, maybe facing a fear you have. I can say that I myself have often had fears about becoming a parent. I don’t think it’s easy. It’s not a given. It’s not something you know. There are people out there who it doesn’t come naturally to, and that’s an actual fear that I think we don’t really talk about that much… I think for me, it was a way for me to actually almost go through it a little bit, and just admit to myself, this is something that I need to actually make a choice with.

Anita’s journey as an individual is obviously at the core of Black Sands, but there are so many other characters who take complex journeys, too. Which characters or moments from the show did you love, particularly in Season 2?

Fríða [played by Lára Jóhanna Jónsdóttir] is a favorite of all of ours, and for obvious reasons. She is basically the protagonist in a way, in this season. She’s the good cop; she’s a beautiful character. I have always had a really soft spot for Steffi [portrayed by Anna Gunndís Guðmundsdóttir]; I feel like she’s one of the most relatable characters. At least she was extremely relatable to me—how she handles things, even though she’s not a heroine in one way or another. She has really ugly sides to her, and we kind of see that in this season.

In the first season, a lot of people said she’s awful; I kept thinking, really? Because she’s also going through something extremely traumatic and hard, where people were not being honest, and conversation should have been had. She’s dealing with that, and she’s doing it in a very human way, which is sometimes ugly and desperate and weird. And then in this season, we meet her daughter, who’s having a hard time dealing with her mom—which is a very common theme we have in this show—but they’re just doing it in a very normal way. She’s rebelling against her mom, and she points out the ways that her parents are being childish. She’s like the voice of reason.

Steffi, she’s not perfect in any way, shape, or form, but there’s nothing really bad about her either. She’s just normal. She’s just such a relatable, normal woman, and everything she does in this [season] and the previous one I thought was fantastic. I really hope people look out for the scene where they meet again, which is a callback to this scene in Season 1.

You mentioned that it’s been a few years since production wrapped. Now that you’ve had time to look back on Black Sands, and viewers are getting a chance to see it on Viaplay, have you ever thought about revisiting the characters?

To be honest, with this show there are so many things where I think, I wish I would have done this better, wish I would have done that better—but character-wise I’m pretty happy with how everything went. I immediately started thinking maybe we should do a third season, but if we were to do that, we were done with this story.

If we were to do another one, I think it would be quite removed. It would be obviously in the same world, but it would be different topics in a way. We’d probably still have the same kind of overlying theme, which is just healing and healing from trauma… But I will say that thought has crossed my mind, and I’m guessing it has crossed all of our minds.

It was very important to us to wrap all the storylines. Sure, I would love for people to get to know the characters even better… You want people to understand your character so perfectly, because you’re rooting for them. Even if they’re bad or whatever, you still want people to understand why they’re the way they are. So, in that sense, the only thing I would say is I wish maybe we could have given Anita a little bit more… I was the one who was like, we need to make other characters bigger and Anita smaller. But then looking back I’m like, maybe we could have explored this a little bit better, just so we don’t lose people’s empathy towards her.

But I think we did everything we could. We had eight episodes, and it’s a slow-burning thing. And we are in this format of crime whodunit, so we also have to give a lot of space for that entire storyline as well. It’s a balancing act, but I think we did the best we could with every single character.

How do you take the momentum and the things you’ve learned from Black Sands and carry them forward into future projects? What comes next?

I’m currently writing a show with my partner… We’re writing something together that also focuses on familial relations. I don’t want to say anything, because we’re pitching it right now as we speak, [but] that’s something that we’re doing.

I have never written anything by myself. I was never going to write anything in my life. I actually said, when I was in acting school, I did say out loud that if I ever had to write anything myself, I would rather just quit and go back to school. I have had to eat my shoe multiple times—at least twice now—and I continue to eat it happily. So I’m trying to get into writing something by myself.

It’s hard to put it at the top of your to-do list—to sit down and write and do the things that you need to do, and treat this as a job. I think that’s a little bit difficult, but that’s one of the things that I’m working on now. I’m trying to fully form an idea that I have by myself, but my script with my partner is much further along.

Both seasons of Black Sands are now streaming on Viaplay. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Viaplay.

Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.