Northern Lights in Iceland: A Personal Encounter with the Far North

There are moments in life where you stare at a message on your phone knowing full well things are about to get weirder. Mine arrived via WeChat... an invitation to a casting call for a beer commercial. I had been living in Shanghai long enough to know that the city has a way of presenting you with bizarre opportunities at completely random moments, and my default response had quietly become: why the hell not.

So I showed up. Stood in front of some cameras. Did whatever they asked. And somehow, against all reasonable odds, I got chosen.

The Shanghai Shoot: An Arctic Beer Commercial, In a Bar, In 30 Degree Heat

The next few days were genuinely surreal. There I was, filming a beer commercial at a bar in Shanghai, playing out some vague premise about drinking cold beer in the Arctic. It was strange in the distinctly Chinese fashion where the logic doesn't always need to track... you just go with it, trust the process, and eat whatever craft services puts in front of you.

And then came the plot twist.

After the Shanghai portion wrapped, someone from the production team mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the rest of the shoot would take place in Iceland. In the middle of winter. In a few weeks.

I nodded and mentally filed it under things that are probably not actually going to happen. This is Shanghai we're talking about. Deals evaporate overnight. Schedules shift spectacularly. I'd believe Iceland when I was standing in Iceland.

"Oh, We're Doing This"

And then I was at the airport, and they handed me a ticket to Copenhagen. And then from Copenhagen to Reykjavik. And just like that, I was on a plane, watching the city I called home disappear beneath a thick grey quilt of cloud, heading north to a country I had never been to, in the coldest month of the year, to film the second half of a beer commercial with a premise I still couldn't fully explain.

Is this what stardom feels like? Probably not. But it felt like something.

The Light: Or Rather, Its Complete Absence

Nothing quite prepares you for what winter does to daylight up there. Back in Shanghai, even the greyest days carry a kind of ambient buzz... the city finds a way to glow. Iceland in winter is a different negotiation entirely.

The sun would make its tentative appearance sometime around half ten, eleven in the morning... if "appearance" is even the right word. It was less a sunrise and more a slow brightening, like someone dialing up a dimmer switch in careful increments. The sky went from black to a cold, wide pale... not quite bright, just extended... before pulling back again by three in the afternoon. The darkness came with a speed that felt almost personal.

We had a tight production schedule and a razor-thin window of usable light. Every hour was mapped out. There was a very real possibility that if something went sideways... weather, wind, the kind of spectacular logistical unraveling that haunts location shoots... we'd miss the whole window.

Fortunately, the shoot came together. The commercial was, admittedly, quite weird. But the Icelandic landscape did what it always does: made everything look dramatic and completely unlike anywhere else on earth.

Chasing the Sky on My Own Time

Between shoot days, I had the evenings free. And each night, I stepped outside and looked up.

I had read everything I could about the northern lights before coming. I knew that plenty of people book dedicated Northern Lights tours specifically to maximize their chances... guides who know which roads to take, how far out of town to drive, and crucially, which nights the forecast is actually favorable versus just technically possible. I had none of that infrastructure available to me at the time. Just me, outside, scarf pulled up to my eyes, staring at a dark sky and willing something to happen.

Night one: nothing. Clear stars, genuinely beautiful, but not a flicker of green in sight.

Night two: a faint smudge that might have been cloud, might have been wishful thinking. Definitely nothing confirmable.

Night three: actual clouds. Just clouds.

Walking those evenings alone and completely jetlagged... down frozen roads, past fields blanketed in snow, the only sound the steady compression of ice under my boots... I understood something about this place. There is a particular quality to the silence up here. It isn't the silence of emptiness; it's the silence of everything absorbing everything. The cold thickens the air. Sound carries differently. Even the horizon feels patient.

Iceland is a country that rewards solo wandering; it's built for it. There are tours for solo travelers that give some structure while still leaving you full exposure to the landscape's weight, and I wish I'd known that going in... the evenings alone between shoots had a strange, clarifying beauty to them, even when the sky refused to cooperate.

But cooperate it did not. Night after night, I went to bed disappointed.

The Final Night

Last night in Iceland. The shoot was wrapped. There was relief, a small low-key celebration, the particular exhaustion of a job completed under strange conditions with barely four hours of real daylight for a week straight.

I went outside. I had genuinely stopped expecting anything.

And then there it was.

A thin green sliver... so faint at first I almost dismissed it as a smear of cloud or a trick of tired eyes. Not dramatic. Not the sweeping celestial theater from every Instagram post I'd ever seen. Just a quiet arc traced above the horizon, tentative, almost uncertain of itself. Like it was testing whether it wanted to stay.

I stood completely still.

Within minutes, it had expanded. The sliver thickened and stretched, reaching across more of the sky in long, unhurried arcs. A second band appeared somewhere above the first. And then they began to move... not with any urgency, but in that slow, deliberate drift that makes you understand immediately why people plan whole trips around this. It does not perform on schedule. It has no interest in your timetable.

By the end, the whole sky was moving.

At some point I realized I had completely stopped thinking about the shoot, the commercial, the connection home, any of it. There was just ice under my boots and the sky rearranging itself in silence overhead... ribbons of green bending, dissolving, reforming somewhere else entirely, the snow below catching just enough of the color to reflect it faintly back up.

No sound. No urgency. Nothing insisting on what should happen next.

The lights dissolved slowly, as they apparently always do, retreating back into ordinary darkness over the course of an hour or so. By morning Iceland looked exactly as it always had: pale, wide, the low sun pulling thin light across the snow. You'd never have known.

But that's the thing about the far north. It holds out until the very last moment. And right when you've stopped asking, the sky opens.

And yes... I have absolutely no idea if the commercial ever aired.