Last month Renate Reinsve took her sister as her plus-one to the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, where she had been nominated for best actress in a drama. “Leonardo DiCaprio stepped on the train of my sister’s dress, he smiled at her and apologised,” Reinsve recalls. “She lives deep in the Norwegian countryside, she’d never been to anything like this in her life, and she had this really deep impulse to touch him. I had to stand between them and say, ‘Please, don’t do it, be cool. Step away!’” Did it ruin the night’s vibe? “Oh no, the two of us had so much fun that night. We got so drunk!”
For Reinsve, 38, plus sibling to be attending the glitzy Globes and — now she has a nomination — the Oscars next month, certainly wasn’t anything anyone from their tiny village of Solbergelva, near Oslo, foresaw. Yet now Reinsve is one of Hollywood’s hottest properties, in the past four and a half years collecting two best actress awards at Cannes, first in 2021 for her performance in the joyously original The Worst Person in the World, directed by the Danish-Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier.
Dress, £3,395, Givenchy by Sarah Burton. Shoes, £820, Louis Vuitton. Knee socks, £46, Comme Si. Scrunchie (throughout), Renate’s own
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Silk jacket, price on application, Louis Vuitton. Tights, £10, Calzedonia.Phillipa ear cuff, £22,120, Ana Khouri. Ring (under daisies), £10,800, Tiffany & Co
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Then last year came the darker yet equally affecting Sentimental Value, also by Trier. When the film premiered at Cannes in May, it received a 19-minute standing ovation. “My cheeks were really stiff from smiling for such a long time,” Reinsve says. “We were very prepared that statistically it shouldn’t be possible to repeat the success of The Worst Person in the World. But the noise around Sentimental Value has been going on for months now.”
Indeed, the film has received nine Oscar and eight Bafta nominations, with two best actress nods for Reinsve (she was previously nominated for a Bafta for The Worst Person in the World). How does she rate her chances of winning? “Don’t talk about that, let’s not jinx anything!”
Tall (she’s 5ft 8in) and make-up free, in a beige wool hoodie (“you need wool in Norway”), baggy jeans and Dr Martens (“for the ice”), Reinsve is sitting in the restaurant of a five-star Oslo hotel eating a chicken salad. Smiley, with an engagingly light-hearted manner, even when making thespian-like statements about “the craft”, she’s just back from the European Film awards in Berlin, where — naturally — she accepted another best actress gong. After all the partying she’s also feeling under the weather and is relieved to be spending a few days doing the school run for her six-year-old son and making his dinner.
“It’s so crazy and my son is going a little crazy with it all. You just want to stay home for a bit and have some sanity. You keep going and going so far, and then once you get home your body’s like, I need a break after all the craziness. Then I mobilise again.”
Dress, POA, Louis Vuitton. Vest, £49, Hanro. Knee socks, £46, Comme Si. Phillipa ear cuff, £22,120, Ana Khouri
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Dress, POA, Louis Vuitton. Socks, £27, Comme Si
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Yet Reinsve’s not whingeing about the whirlwind that has recently engulfed her. “I feel so honoured, because I come from a really, really small place. So the trajectory of our journey, the fact that people are even talking about our film, is such a big win. Where I grew up, Hollywood was so far away I didn’t dare even dream about working there, so to know I’m part of that world now is the best feeling — it’s like I finally belong somewhere I’m at home, with people who share my values and interests, who have curiosity about the same things.”
Reinsve grew up “on a road with some houses, deep in the forest. There was a lot of conformity, people in my life all wanted the same thing.” She had friends, but they worshipped the Backstreet Boys. In contrast, she was devouring philosophy books, David Lynch films and listening to Pink Floyd. “No one else I knew saw the magic of these things or shared my curiosity of how such worlds could be created.”
Her screen idols were kooky legends such as Diane Keaton and Gena Rowlands. What is her take on the cookie-cutter, size-zero starlets who far outnumber such originals? “Hollywood definitely contains that, but that’s only one side. The actors I like had a fierceness and coolness.”
From top: with Stellan Skarsgard in Sentimental Value; and with Anders Danielsen Lie in The Worst Person in the World
Hers sounds like a challenging childhood. Her parents split when she was very young, “then they had new relationships and then they split up again”. The family (she has two sisters, one half-sister and two stepsisters) moved frequently. The constant in her life was her childminder: “So I had a lot of love and care around me.”
Reinsve questioned everything. “At school, when I was nine, which is when [Norwegian] kids stop playing and you’re supposed to sit still at a desk, I remember looking around and thinking, this is not good for anyone. It’s going to ruin my creativity, to break something in me.”
Her contrariness led to a theme of her being constantly thrown out of things. Everyone in her family worked at the hardware store her grandfather had established, but Reinsve was asked to leave. “I just didn’t care enough to show up on time or do the tasks I was supposed to do.” The Girl Scouts kicked her out after she refused to build a birdcage to specifications. “But they suggested I did acting instead, so…”
She joined a theatre group and found her calling. Her first role, aged nine, was as a fox. “My friends were messing around but I was serious. I was like, what has this fox eaten today? Where has it been?”
Dress, £1,610, and headscarf, £950, Calvin Klein Collection. Socks, £27, Comme Si
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Dress, £5,000, Louis Vuitton
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Aged 16, Reinsve moved out of the family home. She’s reluctant to expand, simply saying, “I was too difficult for my mother, although now she’s proud of me.” Living alone, “I just wasn’t good at taking care of myself,” she says. She couldn’t get up in time for school and so ended up being expelled. “I decided, since I had to go away, I’d go as far away as I can.”
Flights to Edinburgh were on sale for £1, so she headed there. After a week her money ran out. “The hostel where I lived felt so sorry for me they gave me a job. But it was so hard at first — especially understanding the Scottish accent. I had a little sign when I worked in the bar that said ‘I’m from Norway, I don’t speak English very well.’”
Two years later she returned to Norway, briefly working in a grocery store in Oslo (where she was also sacked because she didn’t put items on the shelves in the order the boss wanted). Things finally started improving after she enrolled in theatre school, going on to become a well-regarded actress in the city’s buzzing theatre scene. Yet, just before Covid, Reinsve decided she’d had enough. “I’d done theatre for so long. I really loved it but it’s hard physical work, you don’t get any vacations and I couldn’t find a way into cinema as I wanted because in Norway that’s impossible.”
The plan was to start a new life with her partner (her son’s father, now her ex), working as a carpenter. “He had a dream to work with wood in Italy. So we were moving there. It was so weird, I remember lying on my bed, having made my choice, feeling so relieved, and just then I saw a message from Joachim saying, ‘Can we have lunch?’ ”
Skarsgard, Reinsve and Joachim Trier, the director of Sentimental Value
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It turned out that Trier, with whom she had worked before but didn’t know well, had been puzzling over how to give Reinsve the higher profile he knew she deserved. He had decided to write Worst Person specifically for her to play the lead, Julie. The “worst person”, Julie is also one of the most engaging heroines in contemporary cinema in her unending, mercurial — and very relatable — pursuit of love and fulfilment. “I had the feeling making the movie that it was not about me, it was about universal things, making choices — often terrible ones you can’t go back on — and identifying who you are, creating your life for yourself, and how difficult all that is.”
Audiences certainly identified: Reinsve had to deal with both women and men endlessly stopping her to tell her, often emotionally, “Julie is me.” Barack Obama named Worst Person one of his favourite films of 2021 and overnight Reinsve became the hottest name on every casting director’s list, rapidly winning roles in, among others, Apple TV’s Presumed Innocent alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and the film A Different Man opposite Sebastian Stan. Next up she’s working with the acclaimed director Alexander Payne (The Holdovers) on his latest film, Somewhere Out There, set in Denmark.
Trier, meanwhile, rapidly wrote another script for his muse: Sentimental Value, with Reinsve playing Nora, an acclaimed stage actress (no coincidence) navigating a fraught relationship with her selfish, absentee film director father (Stellan Skarsgard). So is Reinsve more quixotic Julie or damaged Nora? “I’m both. I’m like Julie in that I contemplate a lot but I’m quite playful. With Nora it’s about exploring how extremely dark it can get when you don’t understand parts of yourself.”
Yet in many ways playing Nora has freed Reinsve to loosen up. She used to shun schmoozing at parties and the fashion side of the job. “I just wanted to be recognised for my work.” Now, however, she has realised fun can be had from both. She has collaborated with Louis Vuitton and wore a fringed gown sewn with 800,000 beads by Nicolas Ghesquière to the Globes. “It was so heavy, I felt like I was flowing around. When you have something like that on it feels like an armour. I wasn’t into fashion before — I was earning no money, I didn’t have access — but now I really understand the difference between clothes that make you feel grounded and clothes that make you feel elevated, and how they can alter how you feel about yourself.”
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Her chief fellow mischief-maker is Skarsgard, one of the few Scandi actors — along with his son Alexander (Succession) — with an illustrious career both in their home country and internationally. “Stellan’s so fun at parties. We have this tequila challenge: whoever buys tequila first, the other has to drink it. We’ve been such a bad influence on each other. That’s why I need my rest now. But I’m going to visit him in Stockholm, whether he wants it or not, because I’m going to miss him. He’s saying to me — he says it to all the people, he’s protective — ‘Stay in Sweden, stay in Norway, even though you work abroad.’ He’s been able to do that his whole life. It stops you losing your mind, because you can lead a pretty normal life here.”
Reinsve is following that advice, not least because she doesn’t want to uproot her son permanently. She’s on excellent terms with her ex, who runs a construction company. They co-parent 50:50, and when she’s away for long periods, father and son join her wherever in the world she’s filming. “He’s my dream ex! He can work anywhere. Without him all this wouldn’t be possible. So much of the stress of my work is around logistics.”
Jacket, POA, and heels, £1,080, Khaite. Knickers, £28, Cou Cou Intimates. Tights, £10, Calzedonia
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Bra, £54, Cou Cou Intimates. Skirt, POA, Acne Studios. Mules, £125, Femme LA. Necklace, £79,500, Tiffany & Co
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Still, it’s not lost on Reinsve that she’s busily promoting a film about someone who’s so busy with promotional tours they become estranged from their children. She had intended to take this year off to help her son settle into his first year of school. “But too many opportunities came up. I am scared of not being present enough, or of him feeling I love something else more than him. So I really, really make an effort to make him feel involved. I give him all my awards and he’s been with me to some events so he can see what they’re like and doesn’t feel totally on the outside. When we’re at events I only talk to him.”
So if Leo comes up to her at the Oscars she’d diss him if she’s with her son? “Yes, I’d say, ‘No, sorry, I’m with my son. I’ll talk to you next time.’” In fairness, the way Reinsve’s career is going, there probably will be many, many more next times.
Sentimental Value is streaming on Mubi now
Styling Karla Welch Hair Jenny Cho at A-Frame Agency Make-up Emily Cheng at The Wall Group Set design Daniel Horowitz at 11th House Local production Noted Collective Booking Karla Shield