By now, Renate Reinsve is no stranger to the closing-night pomp of the Cannes Film Festival, having won the best actress trophy in 2021 for Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, her first ever leading role. Since then, she’s clearly mastered the art of capturing souls; after reteaming with Trier for last year’s Cannes triumph Sentimental Value, which brought her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars, Reinsve returned to the festival with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, where Fjord, the film they made in collaboration with American star Sebastian Stan, won the Palme d’Or, the director’s second.
In Mungius film — which has officially been selected by Romania as its Oscar hopeful in the Best International Feature Film race — Reinsve plays Lisbet, the wife of a Romanian educator (Stan) who has travelled with his family to live in her Norwegian hometown. After local title-tattle amongst the townsfolk, who deplore the family’s chosen Romanian Christian evangelism, there are accusations that the couple are harming their five children, which leads the state authorities to take the kids into care.
It’s unusual for lightning to strike so many times, especially in Cannes, but Reinsve remembers having a dream — or maybe it was a premonition.
“Joachim was there,” she recalls, “and then there was this Romanian bear, and that kind of represented my transition from Joachim to Cristian.”
I’m eager to learn what kind of bear it was. Male or female? And will it go to the Oscars?
“Male, brown, and the bear was taking me to the forest, like, to another realm,” she says brightly. “Interesting, right?”
Totally, I concur. I love bear tales, having roared at one that had entered a restaurant in Telluride a few years back. In fact, when we bumped into each other at the very same restaurant two years ago, we chuckled about it.
We ponder a moment over what the psychology of the bear and the other stuff in the dream could’ve meant. “I think it’s about the fact that I feel so connected to Joachim, and about going into another movie after a movie that meant so much to me. I knew that this movie would mean a lot, going into these huge themes, and playing a character that I knew was gonna be very challenging to do.
“Of course, [the two directors] are not similar at all,” she adds. “But they do have some similarities, in terms of being so certain of their way of making a movie, and they hold onto their ideals so strongly. So, I knew that I was going from one person’s world, into a completely different world, with another person. I think that was the dream.”
Unlike the contemporary women of Trier’s world, Lisbet, the mother of five that she plays in Fjord, is devoid of vanity, favoring drab long skirts and black coats. No make-up. Her physicality is that of a -longsuffering, exhausted parent.
During early conversations with Mungiu she learned that his camera was “really far away” and that he wanted to remove any kind of manipulation. “Like, you weren’t supposed to lead the audience to any emotional state or lead them to an opinion about the person. So, we had strip away the emotion.”
She shrugs. “I thought, How can you see what she’s going through?”
The prospect frightened her, because she was playing a character having to endure something “so dramatic and so strong” that she was scared the audience wouldn’t connect to what she was going through. As a classically trained actress, she was used to giving the audience “just enough to connect, but still leaving it open to their interpretation”. Now, she says, she was being asked to “leave it very open”.
As Reinsve mulled over the situation, a picture entered her mind about how we react when we drive past an accident on the side of the road.
“In one second, you know how severe it is, because you see how the people move from a distance, and you see how they hold themselves, and you see how if they move slowly or if they move fast, and you know what’s happened. So, I kind of had that image when going through and trying to trust and stay true to Lisbet.”
Having worked in the theater for two decades she enjoys the task of breaking down a character’s mindset and their physicality. In particular, she loves characters “that are quite a lot.” However, she admits to feeling “a bit provoked” that there was this dynamic “where her husband spoke on her behalf, and I had to really find a way for her to do that in a way I could have compassion and understanding with.”
The task was, she continues, “to be very specific at the same time as not judging them, and that was a really hard balance to do.”
I frown at the idea that Lisbet’s husband spoke for her for. However, Reinsve argues that there’s a lot of trust within the relationship “so he knows exactly what she wants and feels” and she’s comfortable with it. In fact, it’s all there up on the screen in her performance, where she captures the character’s empathy and compassion by conveying incredibly subtle — but at the same time very specific — gestures.
Reinsve says that Mungiu likes to shoot a lot of takes. “His poetry really lies within the mise en scène,” she says, in the way that he builds the movements within the frame little by little. The actor recalls standing by the monitor watching him, “and I could see how it really changed how you saw the character, informing you, in a subliminal way, how everything moves within the frame.”
She marvels at his ability, while suggesting that the filmmaker “does so many takes because he builds that poetry of the image slowly from the first take. So, he doesn’t necessarily want you to know your lines from the beginning, you can actually shape it with him while he works on it.”
Reinsve smiles at this, explaining that she didn’t know Mungiu’s shooting methods “from the beginning, so I gave it my all”, and she punches the palm of her hand for emphasis. “The first three takes we ever did in the movie were when she’s told that her kids are going to be taken away. But he gave me the script a week before. It’s 12 minutes, that scene, and I didn’t know his acting style that well yet, so that was a really hard first day. I gave it my all for the first three takes, and then we kept on going for 17 takes while he built it. And then I had to, like, really observe him and learn when he started getting ready. When he’s happy, he rubs his hands, and then I know now I can give it my all,” she says, as she merrily rubs her own hands together.
Reinsve was challenged by Mungiu’s way of working, but, at the same time, found it refreshing. “He’s very specific on rhythm and movement, and then he doesn’t really want to judge the character. So, I had to throw everything I knew out the window and kind of start over, just adapting to what he wanted. And then, of course, when I had gotten his method under the skin, I could slowly start adding elements that I felt were right. Not manipulating them, but adding specific little things that I could kind of enjoy doing.”
Having to learn something new, she says, is “always a little bit humiliating. But then you actually have the opportunity to transform, and I really feel that I have learned so much as an actress going through that process and really opening up to that process, because if I’d just done things I already know… That way, you limit your ability to learn new things.”
In any case, she concedes, working in the theater means that no two performances are the same anyway; and she’s used to performing disparate roles. On the Norwegian stage she has performed much of Ibsen’s canon and more contemporary works such as Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Hadden’s best-seller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
However, she remarks that if she’d started her career in movies — her screen debut was a small part in Trier’s 2011 film Oslo, August 31st — “maybe it would be more natural to go into something again and again that was more me. But now I have this already kind of an approach where I love going into different styles of directing and different characters.”
Mungiu mixed it up from the get-go, she says. When they first met he asked her to read another role, the part of Mia, a liberal minded neighbour — “because he thought that would be the one that I connected to” — but he allowed her to read for Lisbet as well. And as she studied the part, she felt an “overwhelming” connection to Lisbet, both in the “curiosity” of who she was “but also in being a mother myself. Her having her kids taken away was devastating. And I told Cristian that I really had the strongest feeling reading Lisbet, and I felt he was surprised. So, I was already a bit heartbroken because I thought he would give me Mia. It would be more obvious, and I was so happy when I could play Lisbet.”
Immediately, she began a deep dive into matters theological, which meant exploring the rituals of the Pentecostal Church and mingling with congregations. She keenly observed, she says, the connection they had to singing, giving each other food, and how they greeted each other at services held in their homes and official places of worship.
Reinsve familiarised herself with all details of their faith. In so doing, she was struck by how congregants would hold their hands towards God the way they dressed, and the detail of women wearing headbands.,
At times she felt conflicted as she dug into a person “who has different values and different opinions [to me]” and she suggests that the situation was especially challenging because Lisbet’s actions were informed “by values that I don’t believe in myself, but I had to find compassion for those values and why they came to be.”
She laments not having had enough time to further explore Lisbet’s perspective. Put together, there were six months spent on research and shooting. “And I was still not knowing enough,” she sighs.
Seeing as Reinsve is Norwegian herself, I ask if she recognized those people who were so zealous in wanting to take those kids from their parents.
“Well, I’ve heard stories about big mistakes being made in child services in Norway, which is mainly a really good institution and has saved a lot of kids and is doing so many great things. But there have been horror stories of misunderstandings and also, like this, a collision of values.”
She has since talked to people in child services in Norway who have seen the movie, and they are really happy “to have another perspective, a starting point for a conversation. It’s always healthy, even though it is a well-functioning service. Mostly, it’s important to notice when something is off,” she cautions.
Similarly, in the U.S., where Neon released Fjord earlier in October, people are having heated conversations about it, which delights her. “It’s a big debate, and that’s amazing,” she cries. It’s what Mungiu wanted, Reinsve suggests. “Like, to open a conversation, and not only about the themes in the movie, but also having a movie that divides people, and that your empathy for the characters are actually shifting during the movie, and it really is open for everyone’s opinion.”
There was a comfort, Reinsve relates, in having worked with Stan three years prior on A Different Man, “especially here, because the technique of acting was so new in a way, because there were so many elements that were new.” Also, because the two actors are old friends, “You don’t have to warm up. It’s very quiet the way they are together. So, to have to have that familiarity also, I think, made them seem like they had a warmer relationship than their physicality implies.”
The movie shot in a remote Norwegian village of 25 people who were swamped by cast and crew. The nearest food store was miles away, and getting food for everyone was a production in itself, especially when avalanches blocked the roads “so all the crew, all the gear, all the cast needed to go on a boat to get to se. We had a very strong bond in the end. It was really just us and these… ghosts,” she says, dropping a shocker.
What? The rooms at the hotel were haunted, Reinsve says, in a tone of such eeriness that any shadow of doubt on my part was wiped from my face. I shift my chair closer to get the skinny on the specter. “Ghosts definitely haunted that hotel,” she declares. “Everyone had knocking on their doors at night. Everyone had that, and other different experiences too, and it made the stay even more mystical. I don’t think I slept very well for two months. I was so scared,” she says of the phantom menace that lurked in the remote locale, way up in mountains reachable by hops on two planes and then boat or car.
The locals were aware of the apparitions because “it was a thing there.” Some nights, she reveals, “the ghost would knock on my door for, like, two hours, from 1.30am. When I looked… no one was there,” she says adding a ghostly wail for added effect.
Did she turn to drink? Shaking her head, she guffaws and says she didn’t. “We had some parties with food and dancing in circles, Romanian-style, and, well, OK, a little drinking,” she confesses. “It was it was so much fun. The Romanians from the production were very good hosting and singing.” Stan joined in too, she says.
Reinsve admired watching him work. “I’ve seen him close up into production, and he really enjoys it. Like, I can see the joy on his face, thinking about how he can change and going through the process. It’s so fascinating to watch him, because a big part of of acting for him is of course the change on the inside, but also building something from the outside, where he doesn’t even recognize himself.”
Right in the middle of the last awards season, Reinsve was filming Alexander Payne’s Somewhere Out There, and through this one she’ll be portraying visionary feminist and author Mary Wollstonecraft in filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve’s If Love Should Die, a movie that will jump back and forth in time to explore 12 years of her life in England, Revolutionary France and elsewhere in Europe. It’s a co-production involving many locations — “We’re in six countries,” she notes — and she has spent time researching in some of them, including here in Blighty.
She speaks of visiting the Stoke Newington district of north London where Wollstonecraft — mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein — founded a school and worshipped at a church on Newington Green. The actor has walked the streets that Wollstonecraft trod over two centuries ago, taking in museums that now celebrate her life. Reinsve took a similar tour around the philosopher’s Parisian haunts, including the spot where she witnessed Louis XVI attending his trial and “going towards death” by guillotine. “I really love that part of the process. Just the research and trying to get as close to her as possible,” Reinsve says. She really is living her dreams.