Ulrich Nielsen

Ulrich Nielsen is a small-town police officer in Winden, married with three children, when a boy from the local school vanishes into the forest. Gruff and short-tempered, he throws himself into the case with a intensity that seems personal — because decades earlier, his own brother disappeared the same way and was never found.

Oliver Masucci plays him as a man permanently one step from cracking, all clenched jaw and unresolved grief, so that his doggedness reads as both admirable and self-destructive. The show uses his old wound to make a missing-persons case feel like a life reopening, and Masucci never lets you forget the cost of that reopening on his face.