Who plays Astrid in Vikings?
Astrid is played by Josefin Asplund in the original Vikings series.
Explore family, allies and rivals or follow the story sections below.
Cast references: Josefin Asplund.
Explore Astrid’s story
An intimate political circle
She supports Lagertha’s seizure of Kattegat and helps defend the town. Her place beside the ruler combines affection, military participation and access to political decisions.
Abduction and divided allegiance
Harald abducts Astrid and she later marries him. Her effort to warn Lagertha carries a severe personal cost. During the civil war, she asks Lagertha to kill her.
Agency under coercion
A marriage or an apparent accommodation should not erase the captivity and violence surrounding Astrid’s choices. Follow what room she has to refuse and how she uses the limited channels available to her. Her story makes the intimate consequences of alliances visible, especially for someone whose movements become part of another ruler’s ambition.
Relationships & loyalties
Memorable scenes
The warning sent at a terrible cost
Season 5, episode 6
Astrid arranges to warn Lagertha about the planned attack. Hakon’s crew sexually assaults her during the effort, so a successful piece of intelligence reaches Kattegat through suffering the military planners do not share.
Why this moment matters
The warning gives Astrid an action that crosses the allegiance imposed by her abduction and marriage. Its success should not obscure the violence she endures to deliver it. The military value of the information and the personal price of obtaining it occupy the same sequence, exposing a cost that cannot be measured by whether Lagertha receives the message.
Meeting Lagertha on the battlefield
Season 5, episode 10
Astrid asks Lagertha to kill her during the civil war. The encounter places an intimate and coercion-shaped tragedy inside the larger battle, rather than letting her marriage simply define a permanent change of allegiance.
Why this moment matters
The battle briefly becomes a meeting between two people whose intimacy has survived radically changed circumstances. Astrid’s request makes Lagertha confront something no military victory can repair. Reading the encounter only as a dramatic death misses the coercion and despair behind it, while reading it only as passivity misses the terrible choice Astrid insists on making.
Why fans keep talking
The dispute over Astrid concerns the narrowing of a capable person’s options. She begins close to power and skilled in violence, yet later plots repeatedly place her under another person’s control. Some viewers find her final meeting with Lagertha moving; others resent the distance between the warrior introduced and the endangered figure the story increasingly uses. Those responses can coexist because the tragedy depends on precisely that loss of freedom.
What resonates
Her farewell carries emotional force for some viewers, who see a misunderstood character rather than a weak addition to the story.
What divides viewers
Repeated danger and rescue frustrate viewers who want a capable fighter to retain more control over her own story.
Who plays Astrid?
Josefin Asplund portrays Astrid.
Josefin Asplund’s work beyond Vikings includes Pernilla in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011); Sonja in Call Girl (2012); Rebecka Mohlin in The Circle (2015); Johanna Månsson in Conspiracy of Silence (2018); Emily Jansson in Top Dog (2020).