I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about Renate Reinsve.
In films such as “The Worst Person in the World,” “Armand,” “A Different Man” and now Joachim Trier’s sublime family drama “Sentimental Value,” the Norwegian actor, 38, has spent her last four-and-a-half years onscreen flirting recklessly, laughing uncontrollably, screaming in rage and dissolving in tears, all with an utterly unpredictable vitality that has made her perhaps the most exciting performer working today.
But you cannot simply ask the subject of your cover story what has made her the current cinema’s rawest nerve. So, inspired by her latest project — in which she plays Nora, a mercurial actor whose father (Stellan Skarsgård) returns from years of estrangement hoping to cast her in his autobiographical new film and shoot it in the family home — I ask Reinsve to join me on a historic house tour instead.
“I always feel people become more themselves when they’re in their house,” Reinsve tells me on a cloudless autumn morning at Hollyhock House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1921 premonition of California modernism. But for an actor, at least one preparing for a role, that self can begin to fray at the edges: Thus Reinsve, an avowed architecture buff in the midst of her second major renovation, found herself unmoved by “Sentimental Value’s” ravishing 1892 Dragestil (“dragon style”) manse.
“At some point I lose overview of who I am and who the role is,” she says. “It’s like I can’t tell the difference… When I came to the house, and houses are very important to me, I didn’t feel anything. I wasn’t connected to it. And that is very Nora. And I was embarrassed to tell [Trier], because I didn’t realize that process had happened. I never do.”
That Nora contains so many correspondences with Reinsve’s own experience — a grandmother who lived through the Nazi occupation of Norway, a turbulent home life, a younger sister who acts as protector — only intensifies the blurriness, and in turn the performance. “Sentimental Value” is darker, subtler work than “The Worst Person in the World,” less receptive to the viewer’s embrace but ultimately the richer for it; it is the film released this year that I most yearned to see a second time.
Reinsve with Stellan Skarsgård in “Sentimental Value.”
(Kasper Tuxen/NEON)
“I never sat down and thought, ‘I’m going to speculate on this and this and this in her own private relationships,’ but of course I know her history,” says Trier, who first cast Reinsve in a one-line role in his 2011 film “Oslo, August 31st.” “I remember pitching it to her before the screenplay was done and explaining that what I wanted to work on was something with some light and hope through this very fraught relationship and I remember her being very emotional when we talked about that. And I thought, ‘She gets it. She knows what I want to talk about.’”
For Reinsve, who grew up in the forest village of Solbergelva, outside Oslo, fraught relationships, particularly with her mother, inculcated a rebellious streak: By her own admission she was kicked out of everything from the girl scouts and the family business — her grandfather’s hardware store — to, eventually, home and school. She lived with her grandmother for a spell, supported herself for another and eventually fled to Edinburgh, Scotland, while still a teenager, working in a hostel bar for a year before returning to Norway.
From her blended family of whole, half- and stepsisters, Reinsve remains closest to her “rock,” Cecile, a teacher who also serves part-time as her assistant, and sometimes spends hours on the phone discussing a shared love of science (most recently quantum mechanics) with her father, a computer engineer. Despite her intimations of trouble at home, however, she also vividly describes moments in her childhood that fed her burgeoning creativity, whether discovering Pink Floyd in her mother’s record collection, being gifted a photo development kit or finding solace in theater, which swiftly became the only subject in school that interested her.
“I was asked to leave a lot of places,” she recalls, laughing. “I was just very messy, very chaotic… But all of these times I’ve been asked to leave places, I’ve taken it as an opportunity. And the one place I’ve never been asked to leave is in acting.”
With her breakout performance as the romantic heroine of Trier’s 2021 film “The Worst Person in the World,” for which she won the best actress prize at Cannes, cinephiles finally caught up to the filmmaker, who says he wrote the script expressly for Reinsve because “I’d waited 10 years for her to break through and no one gave her a lead part.”
Shortly before filming on that project commenced, he remembers, he had lunch with Isabelle Huppert, who had just seen Reinsve onstage in Oslo and raved about “this one young actor in the purple dress.”
“She has this out-of-controlness that you see,” Reinsve’s most frequent film collaborator, Joachim Trier, says of the actor. “I feel that the camera can read her mind.”
(Bexx Francois/For The Times)
“Isabelle is fairly critical, so a compliment from her no one should take easy,” Trier remarks of the French actor, whom Reinsve herself describes as an idol. “And I said, ‘That girl is going to play the lead in my next film.’”
With acclaim, roles outside of the art house — such as Kane Parsons’ upcoming sci-fi horror film for A24, “The Backrooms” — and now Oscar buzz, Reinsve has also begun to navigate the choppy waters of fame, which has upended her travel schedule and reshaped her relationships. She still finds time for for her favored forms of rest and relaxation, including surfing, climbing and bingeing “Friends,” but now Reinsve must juggle both old friends at home in Oslo and new ones cultivated while making and promoting films around the world. And all it comes second to her 6-year-old son with her ex-partner, the animator Julian Nazario Vargas.
“Some people, they somehow just have the ability to have the same picture of you and they’re not intimidated by it,” she says of her growing prominence. “But some people definitely are, and that makes it complicated. Because there’s nothing you can say to convince people to not project what they’re projecting onto you. That goes for people that you meet — you can sense if they’re projecting something onto you or if they have curiosity about who you actually are. … My son, he doesn’t care. At all. He’s noticed that something is a little bit different with posters everywhere and stuff, but I think I’m managing to make him understand that he’s the most important one. Because he is.”
More challenging has been the Hollywood learning curve, particularly that of American television. “That wasn’t maybe the place to go,” she says now of the 2024 Apple TV series “Presumed Innocent,” in which she played a prosecutor murdered while in the midst of an affair with her boss.
“I felt that there wasn’t any space for anything truly creative and it was kind of set already,” she explains. “You don’t have one director that has a vision and you go towards that. You have the power spread over so many people that you don’t really have anywhere to follow … I feel that also is very, very rare in America, that the director gets that platform to develop what they want to develop, a personal story.”
She prefers Trier’s approach, which he began to develop while studying under masters such as Stephen Frears and Mike Leigh at the National Film and Television School in London: About six weeks of thrice-weekly meetings to exchange ideas, build trust and create space for focused exploration, followed by the “tumble dryer” of filming, with 10- to 12-hour days of immersion and, ultimately, improvisation. One of my most striking discoveries of this story, after years of interviews in which actors insisted that their character was “all there on the page,” was how much of “Sentimental Value” as it appears onscreen was not — not least the sisters’ bedtop embrace at the emotional climax of the film, which became its defining image, and which Reinsve credits to co-star Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas.
Reinsve says that this moment in “Sentimental Value” was the outcome of an improvisation by costar Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who plays her sister.
(Kasper Tuxen)
“I want the actors to contribute something unexpected, even for themselves, because it creates some energy of lifelikeness,” Trier explains. “It’s not the same as ‘realism,’ that’s a very difficult term for me… Ultimately, [it’s about] trying to get rid of the strain of ‘intention,’ the idea that they try to show me something. I’m not interested in that.”
To wit, after seeing the film for the first time I fixated on a gesture of Reinsve’s — part yawn, part stretch, part self-hug — that struck me as impossible to plan in advance: It was the something about her that I set out to understand in the first place.
“She has this out-of-controlness that you see,” Trier agrees. “She unhinges herself within the structure of the scene. I think great art comes from the right balance of control and chaos, and she has that … She has all these emotional reactions where I feel that the camera can read her mind.”
Perhaps it is the element of chaos in acting, reminiscent of her own “messy” years, that at once attracts and tests Reinsve, who says she was the one who devised Nora’s description of the craft’s appeal that we see in the film: “When you go out on stage, it’s so counterintuitive,” the character, beset with stage fright, explains. “Your whole body screams as you step out to face the audience. There’s nowhere to hide … I love it!”
“With Joachim, he was searching for something very authentic and very similar to how I would deal with an emotional situation and that was way scarier for me,” Reinsve says, and yet she envisions herself continuing to work with filmmakers who expect the same, driving relentlessly toward their distinctive vision, rather than seeking out the comforts of conventional stardom.
Trier expresses it more bluntly: “She won’t,” he predicts, “become one of those vain actors who play it safe.”
La Huppert would be proud.
(Bexx Francois / For The Times)