The obvious first question is “How?” As in how exactly did Catherine Cohen — the Houston-born, New York-forged comedian — wind up in “Sentimental Value,” the Norwegian arthouse film that’s nominated for no fewer than nine Oscar awards, including Best Picture?
Simple. She took a red eye.
“I have an amazing agent who emailed me saying Joachim Trier was looking for an American person for this role that had a slightly comedic tone,” Cohen said of the film’s auteur director during a recent interview. She was in Los Angeles, Trier was in New York and leaving the next day. She didn’t think twice about hopping on a plane. “I needed to meet him. I’m obsessed with his films. He’s a genius.”
Cohen arrived at the casting office the next morning, exhausted and “super, super nervous.”
“And then as soon as I met him, he was just so kind and warm and cool,” she said. “He was like ‘Let’s chat.’ And I was like ‘Hell yeah.’”
Cohen came up doing weekly cabaret nights at actor Alan Cumming’s East Village club, aptly named Club Cumming, where she still performs. Her humor leans millennial (complimentary) — campy and theatrical but with a knowing, self-aware edge. It’s a style that’s earned her a Netflix special, a long-running podcast called “Seek Treatment,” and a devoted following that tends to find her wherever she shows up.
Trier’s office had sent over a general vibe of what they wanted for the role, “just this idea of these American industry types who are so out of touch.” The two did some improv and she went home feeling hopeful. Not long after, she heard the part was hers.
The film centers on a once-celebrated Norwegian director, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughters while trying to mount a comeback film — one that eventually gets swept up into a Netflix production with bright-eyed American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). Cohen’s publicist character exists in that orbit, often on her phone.
The role is a relatively small one, but, in a “richly textured, category-resistant movie about love, art and identity,” as the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis describes it, even the bit parts carry weight. (“Sentimental Value” reportedly received a 19-minute standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival premiere.)
The shoot took Cohen to a beach in France (“in the middle of the night”) as well as to Oslo, where she’d never been. “It was really the coolest thing ever,” she said. “I was just watching some of the greatest actors of all time, who I’ve admired my whole life, do their thing.”
She was, by her own admission, starstruck by the larger cast. “I get very shy, and then I open up over time,” she said. “But everyone was so nice and friendly and generous.”
Trier, Cohen says, was just as deliberate about her character as anything else in the film: “Who is this woman? Who is this publicist who’s on the beach in France? What’s going through her head? … Is she sick of her client’s antics?”
Her scenes were opposite Cory Michael Smith, who plays another American industry figure. Cohen had been a fan since seeing him in “May December.” “I love him,” she said. “I had seen him and was like, that’s a truly brilliant actor.” Getting to spend a week in Oslo eating dinner with him was, she said, an unexpected perk of arthouse cinema.
Her brief appearance in the film hasn’t gone unnoticed.
“cat cohen was genuinely incredible at being on her phone in sentimental value,” one person wrote on X.
“Just went to see Sentimental Value. Why did no one make me aware of Cat Cohen being in it? Hellloooo???? Cat Cohen in an Oscar nominated film Omfg?” wrote another.
And her friends in New York reported that when they saw the movie, the audience was excited to see Cohen, too.
“I was like, ‘I contain multitudes, and I’m taking a dramatic turn, and stay tuned for more,’” Cohen said.
She was being self-deprecating, but “Sentimental Value” is not Cohen’s only recent brush with prestige.
This year, she also appeared in Edgar Wright’s “The Running Man” as a pseudo-Kardashian in a future dystopia, and she has been building a steady career in television alongside her comedy work, popping up in “What We Do in the Shadows,” “Only Murders in the Building” and, most recently, Netflix’s “Sirens.”
Next up: a role in “Goodbye Girl,” a romcom shooting outside New Orleans with Kiernan Shipka and Cole Sprouse, and an indie in post-production — about “two girls who are convinced that an ayahuasca trip will save their lives” — that she shot upstate with Helena York.
“I’m still very ‘pinch me,’” Cohen said. “ Being an artist can be so difficult and isolating, and so any successes, it’s so important to zoom out and really just be so full of gratitude that you’ve gotten to do the thing you dreamt of doing.”
The obvious last question is, of course, “What?” As in what will she be wearing to the Oscars.
Cohen, it turns out, had not yet secured an invitation when we spoke. “I’m really trying to snag an invite,” she said. “I’m not sure how it’s gonna go down.”
But she’s not giving up. “I’m going to go to LA and I’m gonna try and make it happen,” she said. “I’m gonna bring a dress.”
Cohen, it turned out, had not yet secured an invitation when we spoke. “I’m really trying to snag an invite,” she said. “I’m going to go to LA and I’m gonna try and make it happen … I’m gonna bring a dress.”
Well, she did make it happen, a publicist confirmed earlier this week. “[S]he will be attending the Oscars this Sunday. Thanks!”
No word on the dress.