{"id":360013,"date":"2025-12-21T16:20:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T16:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/360013\/"},"modified":"2025-12-21T16:20:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T16:20:08","slug":"renate-reinsve-on-vomit-inducing-reviews-and-19-minute-standing-ovations-you-feel-your-face-go-stiff-from-smiling-so-long-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/360013\/","title":{"rendered":"Renate Reinsve on vomit-inducing reviews and 19-minute standing ovations: \u2018You feel your face go stiff from smiling so long\u2019 | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

One day in July 2021, Renate Reinsve got up, read the Guardian and promptly vomited. It was \u2013 mostly \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u201cthis movie is great, but I am shit!\u201d Hours later she was confronting the possibility that she might be one of the greatest actors of her generation. This newspaper\u2019s verdict<\/a> \u2013 \u201cA star is born\u201d \u2013 was, she said, \u201ctoo much to process, so I just started puking. My whole image of myself and what I could do just changed instantly.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t let the acclaim go to her head. \u201cI was very overwhelmed and then I sat with it and was like: OK, I need to keep a distance to this somehow,\u201d she recalls, sitting on the sofa in a cavernous hotel suite in Soho, London. \u201cYou\u00a0can\u2019t take criticism too personally and you can\u2019t take praise too personally.\u201d Such affirmation, I imagine, must become addictive. \u201cYes. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s brilliance hinged on the rare relatability of its protagonist, a combination of the character\u2019s frustrated search for fulfilment \u2013 too many professional epiphanies; initially euphoric but ultimately disappointing relationships \u2013 and the actor\u2019s unaffectedly vivacious and profoundly layered performance. Her smile alone is a portal to an entire interior universe.<\/p>\n

Reinsve and Inga-Ibsdotter-Lilleaas in Sentimental Value. Photograph: Kasper-Tuxen-Andersen<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for Reinsve to notice that people were identifying hard with Julie. On an early press round, she encountered a fortysomething interviewer who \u201cwas 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.\u201d The actor realised \u201cOh, this is what the movie is to people, they really feel that it\u2019s them.\u201d Indeed, The Worst Person in the World isn\u2019t merely an astonishingly accurate portrayal of how it feels to be a young woman. Thanks to Reinsve, it\u2019s also an astonishingly accurate portrayal of how it feels to live a life.<\/p>\n

Following up this once-in-a-lifetime role was always going to be a challenge. The US quickly came calling: Reinsve\u2019s 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 \u201cthis will be my downfall \u2013 this is going to be crap and that\u2019s the way it is. And then it wasn\u2019t that bad!\u201d<\/p>\n

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 Skarsg\u00e5rd) saunters back into her\u00a0life brandishing a semi-autobiographical script he\u2019s\u00a0written 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.<\/p>\n

I was a\u00a0quirky kid very interested in everything to\u00a0do with existentialism and listening to Pink Floyd in secret<\/p>\n

During the shoot, Reinsve deliberately convinced herself the film could never live up to The Worst Person in the World. By Cannes, she was \u201cvery open to anything, because it\u2019s really hard to tell if it\u2019s good or not when you\u2019re in the movie yourself\u201d. Sentimental Value is, admittedly, a less immediately irresistible beast than the millennial Bildungsroman that made the pair\u2019s 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<\/a> 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? \u201cYou just feel that your face is really stiff from smiling for so long,\u201d says Reinsve, fully appreciating the absurdity.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 who the actor describes as \u201chappy-go-lucky, melancholic but naive\u201d \u2013 there was some crossover. Trier \u201cwrites something of what he has seen\u201d, she explains. Then, during production, Julie became even \u201cmore my perspective, or the way I knew how to be a person in these situations\u201d. For Nora, on the other hand, the director \u201cwanted to challenge me on going even deeper into emotional weight\u201d. Still, one parallel is especially stark. Not only is Nora an actor, she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Reinsve grew up in a remote part of Norway \u2013 not even a village, just \u201ca road with some houses\u201d in the forest \u2013 where she always felt out of place. She was \u201ca\u00a0quirky kid very interested in everything that had to\u00a0do with existentialism\u201d (she later bonded with Trier\u00a0over both of them being \u201csentimental and melancholic way too early\u201d). While her preteen peers were fawning over the Backstreet Boys, she was \u201clistening to Pink Floyd in secret. So I knew that I was looking for something else.\u201d She found hints of it in Hollywood icons such as Diane Keaton, who \u201cmade it possible for quirky girls to feel accepted\u201d and David Lynch, whose embrace of\u00a0the subconscious fascinated her. \u201cThrough movies, I really found my\u00a0friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

Real life wasn\u2019t making sense in quite the same way. The major theme of Reinsve\u2019s youth is rejection: she got asked to leave, in approximate order, girl scouts (for \u201cdoing everything wrong\u201d); the family construction business (\u201cI never could follow the rules\u201d); her childhood home (\u201cI was, to put it mildly, too different from my mother\u201d); and eventually school. By that time she was 16 and living alone. \u201cI was not finding a way to organise my life. I didn\u2019t have the skills. So I would not show up if I was sleeping in and I was just a little bit wild.\u201d<\/p>\n

Value added \u2026 Renate Reinsve. Photograph: Carlotta Cardana\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Acting had long been a way to subconsciously process the \u201csocial dynamics\u201d she was struggling with. When she was nine, Reinsve joined a youth theatre half an hour\u2019s drive away, where her talent was affirmed. \u201cWhen I was 14 someone came to the back room with a card and said: \u2018You should apply for a theatre school.\u2019\u201d The prospect of acting for a living gave her \u201cbutterflies\u201d.<\/p>\n

But first, Reinsve \u201cran away from everything. I felt I didn\u2019t fit in and was looking for something in a different place.\u201d At 17 she ended up in Edinburgh: she\u2019d 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 \u201creally cheap\u201d 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 \u201cpartying\u201d but her English wasn\u2019t great and she struggled to understand British humour (\u201cthe last thing you learn in a language\u201d). Back in Norway, Reinsve studied drama and spent the next decade making a name for herself on stage. Norwegian theatre is, she says, \u201creally good\u201d \u2013 high-brow, cutting-edge and closely linked with avant garde Berlin institutions \u2013 but she soon felt as if she was at a dead end. \u201cI\u2019d done it for so many years, it\u2019s very hard physical work and I had worked with so many great directors. I was like: OK, I\u00a0think I\u2019m done.\u201d She wasn\u2019t getting offered any film\u00a0projects that interested her either, so decided to \u201cdo something else\u201d \u2013 she considered retraining as a\u00a0carpenter, having enjoyed renovating a dilapidated house she\u2019d bought \u2013 and let go of being an actor\u201d..<\/p>\n

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\u2019d appeared fleetingly in his acclaimed 2011 film Oslo, August 31st, and was baffled that almost a decade later she was still\u00a0treading the boards. \u201cOne or two days\u201d after she\u2019d decided to pack in acting, \u201cJoachim called me for Julie\u201d.<\/p>\n

So many exciting things are happening because of Joachim. We all understand: Oh,\u00a0something\u2019s happening now<\/p>\n

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\u2019t make the final cut). While she is generally wary of improvisation \u2013 \u201cbecause you can lose the layers: you\u00a0want to say something and you want the audience to\u00a0hear something else and see something third\u201d \u2013 she\u00a0did make some alterations to the script. \u201cWhen Nora explains what she loves about acting in the theatre, what [Trier] thought didn\u2019t resonate with me\u00a0\u2013 there were other things that were more important to\u00a0me.\u201d (In\u00a0one scene, Nora tells Agnes that immersing herself in the perspectives of different characters \u201cmaybe provides me the security to connect to my own\u00a0feelings\u201d.)<\/p>\n

Oslo motion \u2026 Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World. Photograph: Kasper Tuxen\/AP<\/p>\n

Despite the interest from the US (last year she also starred in Apple TV\u2019s Presumed Innocent alongside Jake Gyllenhaal), Reinsve seems to be sticking around\u00a0Scandinavia. Last year, she led the Cam\u00e9ra d\u2019Or-winning Armand, directed by Halfdan Ullmann T\u00f8ndel, grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, and she recently reunited with Stan for the upcoming film Fjord, about Romanian immigrants in Norway\u00a0(she has also been cast in Alexander Payne\u2019s Denmark-set Somebody Out There). Is she loyal to the local scene?\u00a0\u201cNot really, because I started so late and I wasn\u2019t\u00a0let in!\u201d she laughs. \u201cIt\u2019s not loyalty, it\u2019s actually that it\u2019s so many exciting things happening because of Joachim.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that Trier and Reinsve\u2019s success is putting modern Norwegian film on the map \u2013 does she feel like she\u2019s actively contributing to the country\u2019s cinematic identity? \u201cYes, absolutely. We all understand: Oh,\u00a0something\u2019s happening now.\u201d As for what makes Norway\u2019s output distinctive, \u201cthat\u2019s so hard for me to see because I\u2019m so in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crucially, after a childhood of alienation, Reinsve is now in the thick of things: a linchpin of her homeland\u2019s film industry and a celebrated actor on the world stage. \u201cI don\u2019t know what this feeling is \u2026\u201d she says, with genuine incredulity and one of her trademark multidimensional smiles. \u201cA feeling of not believing that you finally feel you belong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sentimental Value is in cinemas on Boxing Day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One day in July 2021, Renate Reinsve got up, read the Guardian and promptly vomited. It was \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-360013","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}