New play in Denmark charts Novo Nordisk’s weight loss boom

A play examining the meteoric rise of Danish weight-loss drug giant Novo Nordisk (NOVOb.CO), opens new tab will premiere on Saturday at a theatre outside Copenhagen.
“The Golden Calf” tells the story of August and Marie Krogh, the Danish couple who founded Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium in 1923, a precursor to Novo Nordisk that’s now valued at $200 billion.
The company had a market capitalization larger than the entire Danish economy at its peak and is now battling with U.S. rival Eli Lilly to dominate the global obesity drug market.
“It’s a piece of our common story about these two scientists who get insulin to Denmark and start this huge snowball that becomes Novo Nordisk,” the play’s director Nicolei Faber told Reuters, adding the play was made without Novo’s involvement.
The second part explores the drugmaker’s evolution into a global behemoth through its GLP-1 drugs Wegovy for weight-loss and Ozempic treatment for diabetes.
The firm became Europe’s most valuable in June 2024, before mounting competition and slowing growth led it to announce plans to cut 9,000 jobs globally, including 5,000 in Denmark.
“Everybody has some relationship to Novo Nordisk and everybody’s pension has stocks in Novo,” said Sebastian Henry Aagaard-Williams, an actor in the play, which will be performed at the Mungo Park theatre around 30 km (19 miles) north of Copenhagen.
But while widely promoted GLP-1 drugs have proven effective weight-loss treatments for many people, they are also costly and may need to be ongoing, bringing dilemmas for patients, insurers and public health systems.
“Do they produce this medicine to earn money or to help people who are sick? And where’s the balance between these two things?” director Faber said.
Novo says its drugs bring significant health benefits that could help reduce long-term health care costs and has defended payments to U.S. medical professionals as necessary for research, education and raising awareness about obesity. The company declined to comment on the play.