Timo Eränkö entered the University of Helsinki in 1971. The same year he joined the Students’ Theatre.

‘Everything really came from the Students’ Theatre. I don’t know if I would have written anything without it.’

Eränkö remembers that he got a job as an actor thanks to a role he performed in the Students’ Theatre in 1979.

‘I was in the play Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, which we also performed in Hungary. I played the Marquis de Sade and the part got me a year-long acting job in the Joensuu City Theatre. It must have been good performance!’

Encouraged by his acting career, Eränkö began to write plays in the 1970s. He finished his BA in 1981 but did not stop his theatre career. Since then, Eränkö has written numerous plays for theatre companies such as Maailmanpyörä.

‘They have been hour-long musicals with a taste of morality in them. The plays are often very violent, reflecting our times. You have to bring the gritty half of the world to light. That is the responsibility of a humanist. When these things are kept silent, terrible things happen.’

Eränkö says that university studies are an important part of an actor and screenwriter’s career, as are literary criticism, theatre studies and social psychology.

‘The process is hardly different from social psychology. The theatre deals with the same things as social psychology, that is, human behaviour in different situations.’

The interactions between people is also something that Eränkö is currently handling in his upcoming play.

‘My forthcoming play, Onnellisuusmittari (‘The happiness meter’), deals with a phenomena which I call ‘enslavemorey’. I mean that people will voluntarily submit to the prevailing norms and even compete over who is more ordinary. It is an absurdity to me.’

In addition to the theatre, Eränkö has also acted in many television series and films, such as those of Aki and Mika Kaurismäki and the popular Finnish crime series Raid.