One day in July 2021, Renate Reinsve got up, read the Guardian and promptly vomited. It was – mostly – a happy kind of hurl. The Norwegian actor was at Cannes, where The Worst Person in the World had premiered the previous evening. Joachim Trier’s film, which follows Julie, a young woman on a capricious yet uncompromising quest for meaning and happiness, was the first Reinsve had ever starred in. During the screening, she decided “this movie is great, but I am shit!” Hours later she was confronting the possibility that she might be one of the greatest actors of her generation. This newspaper’s verdict – “A star is born” – was, she said, “too much to process, so I just started puking. My whole image of myself and what I could do just changed instantly.”
Reinsve went on to win the best actress prize at the festival. Her performance would later be shortlisted for a Bafta and a slew of other awards (the film itself received two Oscar nominations). The accolades certainly helped on the self-esteem front, but the 38-year-old knew she mustn’t let the acclaim go to her head. “I was very overwhelmed and then I sat with it and was like: OK, I need to keep a distance to this somehow,” she recalls, sitting on the sofa in a cavernous hotel suite in Soho, London. “You can’t take criticism too personally and you can’t take praise too personally.” Such affirmation, I imagine, must become addictive. “Yes. And everything in life shall pass. So the aim was to keep everything a little bit even and keep the image I have of myself intact.”
Serene, meticulously self-effacing and aspirationally Scandi-chic in brown denim and black loafers, Reinsve is about as far from the archetypal fame monster as you could possibly imagine. For fans of The Worst Person in the World, this will be welcome news. The film’s brilliance hinged on the rare relatability of its protagonist, a combination of the character’s frustrated search for fulfilment – too many professional epiphanies; initially euphoric but ultimately disappointing relationships – and the actor’s unaffectedly vivacious and profoundly layered performance. Her smile alone is a portal to an entire interior universe.
It didn’t take long for Reinsve to notice that people were identifying hard with Julie. On an early press round, she encountered a fortysomething interviewer who “was a little bit agitated [that] someone in her 30s was telling her story. Like: how do you know how I feel? And then the next [journalist] was in his 20s and he was like, I just want to say: This is me.” The actor realised “Oh, this is what the movie is to people, they really feel that it’s them.” Indeed, The Worst Person in the World isn’t merely an astonishingly accurate portrayal of how it feels to be a young woman. Thanks to Reinsve, it’s also an astonishingly accurate portrayal of how it feels to live a life.
Following up this once-in-a-lifetime role was always going to be a challenge. The US quickly came calling: Reinsve’s next major (and first English-speaking) role was opposite Sebastian Stan as an actor whose facial disfigurement is miraculously cured in A Different Man. To calm her nerves she opted to embrace failure, deciding “this will be my downfall – this is going to be crap and that’s the way it is. And then it wasn’t that bad!”
Pre-empting disaster evidently remains her defence mechanism of choice. In May, Trier and Reinsve returned to Cannes with Sentimental Value, a funny, sad, ambitious film about the tensions between family, art and love. She plays Nora, a depressive actor whose estranged film-maker father (Stellan Skarsgård) saunters back into her life brandishing a semi-autobiographical script he’s written as a vehicle for her talents. When an indignant Nora refuses the role, he casts up-and-coming American starlet Rachel (Elle Fanning) instead, while continuing to discomfit Nora and her sister Agnes with his eccentric presence.
During the shoot, Reinsve deliberately convinced herself the film could never live up to The Worst Person in the World. By Cannes, she was “very open to anything, because it’s really hard to tell if it’s good or not when you’re in the movie yourself”. Sentimental Value is, admittedly, a less immediately irresistible beast than the millennial Bildungsroman that made the pair’s names. But it is also a beautiful, devastating, richly thematic intergenerational tour de force which ended up winning the Grand Prix, generating plenty of Oscar buzz for Reinsve, who has already received a Golden Globe best actress nomination for her performance, and, reportedly, receiving a 19-minute standing ovation, the third-longest in Cannes history. What was it like to sit through that? “You just feel that your face is really stiff from smiling for so long,” says Reinsve, fully appreciating the absurdity.
Like Julie, Nora was written especially for Reinsve by Trier and his collaborator Eskil Vogt. Does this mean those characters are actually based on her as a person? With Julie – who the actor describes as “happy-go-lucky, melancholic but naive” – there was some crossover. Trier “writes something of what he has seen”, she explains. Then, during production, Julie became even “more my perspective, or the way I knew how to be a person in these situations”. For Nora, on the other hand, the director “wanted to challenge me on going even deeper into emotional weight”. Still, one parallel is especially stark. Not only is Nora an actor, she’s a big fish in the small pond of Norwegian theatre who has a film created for her by a director who believes she deserves success on a far greater scale.
Reinsve grew up in a remote part of Norway – not even a village, just “a road with some houses” in the forest – where she always felt out of place. She was “a quirky kid very interested in everything that had to do with existentialism” (she later bonded with Trier over both of them being “sentimental and melancholic way too early”). While her preteen peers were fawning over the Backstreet Boys, she was “listening to Pink Floyd in secret. So I knew that I was looking for something else.” She found hints of it in Hollywood icons such as Diane Keaton, who “made it possible for quirky girls to feel accepted” and David Lynch, whose embrace of the subconscious fascinated her. “Through movies, I really found my friends.”
Real life wasn’t making sense in quite the same way. The major theme of Reinsve’s youth is rejection: she got asked to leave, in approximate order, girl scouts (for “doing everything wrong”); the family construction business (“I never could follow the rules”); her childhood home (“I was, to put it mildly, too different from my mother”); and eventually school. By that time she was 16 and living alone. “I was not finding a way to organise my life. I didn’t have the skills. So I would not show up if I was sleeping in and I was just a little bit wild.”
Acting had long been a way to subconsciously process the “social dynamics” she was struggling with. When she was nine, Reinsve joined a youth theatre half an hour’s drive away, where her talent was affirmed. “When I was 14 someone came to the back room with a card and said: ‘You should apply for a theatre school.’” The prospect of acting for a living gave her “butterflies”.
But first, Reinsve “ran away from everything. I felt I didn’t fit in and was looking for something in a different place.” At 17 she ended up in Edinburgh: she’d fallen in love with the city while performing to tiny audiences with her theatre group as part of the festival fringe (plus the flights were “really cheap” and she had no money). To support herself she worked double shifts in a hostel-restaurant-bar, a destination for international travellers. She loved being exposed to different cultures and enjoyed the “partying” but her English wasn’t great and she struggled to understand British humour (“the last thing you learn in a language”). Back in Norway, Reinsve studied drama and spent the next decade making a name for herself on stage. Norwegian theatre is, she says, “really good” – high-brow, cutting-edge and closely linked with avant garde Berlin institutions – but she soon felt as if she was at a dead end. “I’d done it for so many years, it’s very hard physical work and I had worked with so many great directors. I was like: OK, I think I’m done.” She wasn’t getting offered any film projects that interested her either, so decided to “do something else” – she considered retraining as a carpenter, having enjoyed renovating a dilapidated house she’d bought – and let go of being an actor”..
Little did she know that Trier had been busy writing something just for her. The director had been convinced of her superstar potential ever since she’d appeared fleetingly in his acclaimed 2011 film Oslo, August 31st, and was baffled that almost a decade later she was still treading the boards. “One or two days” after she’d decided to pack in acting, “Joachim called me for Julie”.
In Sentimental Value, Reinsve returns to her theatre days via Nora. She even got to realise a long-held dream of playing Hamlet (although those scenes didn’t make the final cut). While she is generally wary of improvisation – “because you can lose the layers: you want to say something and you want the audience to hear something else and see something third” – she did make some alterations to the script. “When Nora explains what she loves about acting in the theatre, what [Trier] thought didn’t resonate with me – there were other things that were more important to me.” (In one scene, Nora tells Agnes that immersing herself in the perspectives of different characters “maybe provides me the security to connect to my own feelings”.)
Despite the interest from the US (last year she also starred in Apple TV’s Presumed Innocent alongside Jake Gyllenhaal), Reinsve seems to be sticking around Scandinavia. Last year, she led the Caméra d’Or-winning Armand, directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, and she recently reunited with Stan for the upcoming film Fjord, about Romanian immigrants in Norway (she has also been cast in Alexander Payne’s Denmark-set Somebody Out There). Is she loyal to the local scene? “Not really, because I started so late and I wasn’t let in!” she laughs. “It’s not loyalty, it’s actually that it’s so many exciting things happening because of Joachim.”
It’s true that Trier and Reinsve’s success is putting modern Norwegian film on the map – does she feel like she’s actively contributing to the country’s cinematic identity? “Yes, absolutely. We all understand: Oh, something’s happening now.” As for what makes Norway’s output distinctive, “that’s so hard for me to see because I’m so in it.”
Crucially, after a childhood of alienation, Reinsve is now in the thick of things: a linchpin of her homeland’s film industry and a celebrated actor on the world stage. “I don’t know what this feeling is …” she says, with genuine incredulity and one of her trademark multidimensional smiles. “A feeling of not believing that you finally feel you belong.”
Sentimental Value is in cinemas on Boxing Day.
