Erling Haaland will voice a fierce Viking warrior in the animated children's film Viqueens, producers confirmed at the Cannes Film Festival.
The casting announcement, made at Cannes, names Haaland among a cast led by Rita Ora and Ella Purnell, with Alan Carr in a smaller role as a "lyrically challenged royal scribe." The film is directed and co-written by Norwegian filmmaker Harald Zwart, and producers said Haaland will make his feature acting debut in the project.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Haaland is set to play an animated version of himself in Viqueens, a tale set in a world of fearless warrior girls, icy fjords and Silk Road mythology. Zwart, a fellow Norwegian best known for The Karate Kid, framed the choice as both natural and electric for the story. "Erling has already become a kind of real-life Viking icon around the world – powerful, fearless and uniquely Norwegian," Zwart said. "Bringing him into this universe as himself gives the film an unexpected energy and authenticity that felt completely right for this story."
The timing adds weight: Haaland joined Manchester City in 2022 from Borussia Dortmund and is currently leading the race for the Golden Boot with 26 goals in the 2025-26 Premier League season. That standing on the pitch makes the casting notable — it turns a sporting superstar whose image has long been compared to a marauding Viking into a central figure in a family movie that aims for a Christmas Day release.
Viqueens is explicitly a children's tale, but the presence of a high-profile striker who carries a global sporting profile introduces a friction point. Haaland's on-field persona — the powerhouse forward who dominates defenses — is the quality Zwart cites as creative fuel; it is also an image rooted in a kind of rugged masculinity at odds with the film's focus on fearless warrior girls. The director's decision to have Haaland appear as himself blurs those lines, asking whether a star known for physical dominance can be reframed as a source of authenticity in a story about young heroines.
The casting also closes an arc for Haaland away from the pitch: he will make his feature acting debut in a film due for release around Christmas, placing his first major screen role squarely in the holiday marketplace. For a performer who has been compared to a Viking both in looks and playing style, the film presents a straightforward proposition — it leverages that image to give a children's story a recognizable, headline-grabbing face — and a risk: whether that recognition will translate to family audiences rather than simply to sports fans.
Viqueens will arrive on Christmas Day, and with Zwart's public endorsement of Haaland's persona — "powerful, fearless and uniquely Norwegian" — the film will be the moment millions first see the striker outside match highlights. For Haaland, who joined Manchester City in 2022, the holiday release is his formal crossing into entertainment; it will tell us, definitively, whether his Viking icon status can carry beyond football into a very different kind of stage.
