Renate Reinsve: “I Always Feel Less Alone After Watching Movies”

In Sentimental Value, Renate Reinsve reunites with Joachim Trier for another masterclass in sophisticated, emotionally driven storytelling. Here, she talks about what drives their collaboration

Renate Reinsve has been thinking a lot about family of late. “You know how at Christmas time, you go back to that same dynamic you were in as a kid?” says the 38-year-old actress, at home in Oslo on a break from touring the world with her new film. “And it happens so fast.”

It’s not just the upcoming festive period that’s got Reinsve in a ruminative mood. Sentimental Value, her second major collaboration with The Worst Person in the World director Joachim Trier, is a beautifully crafted drama with an elegant lens on familial strife. The film stars Reinsve as Nora, a stage actress whose mum has just died after a long illness; Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as little sister Agnes, a constant source of comfort to Nora despite their wildly differing natures; and Stellan Skarsgård as their absentee dad, Gustav, an acclaimed film director. Blurring the lines between stage, screen and everyday life to suggest the roles we all inhabit in families, it’s a film that examines the “dynamic between real life and what you perform, and how two affect one another,” says Reinsve. 

The drama unfolds when Gustav arrives at the family home on the day of his ex-wife’s funeral. It soon transpires he has another reason for coming: a screenplay he’s written about his own mum, a resistance member during the war who later took her own life, that he wants Nora to play in. When she refuses, he offers the part to an American actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who comes to Oslo in preparation for the role. The question of whether Gustav uses the script as an opportunity to reconcile with his daughter or to further his own career becomes a major thread of the film, and one that’s not so easy to unpick. 

“Gustav is very similar to Nora, in that he also struggles to have good relationships in real life,” says Reinsve over Zoom, keeping a watchful eye on her six-year-old child who’s off sick from nursery. “But you also see him being so tender and so good with Rachel, the way he wishes he could be with his daughters.”

Nora knows deep down she’s a lot like her dad, and there’s a sense that her feelings of resentment towards him are at least in part a projection. “It’s an uncomfortable feeling, when you feel that you’re similar to someone and you notice those traits in yourself, but you don’t really like them in the other person,” says Reinsve. “Nora is entitled to her anger but [she’s so caught up in it] she doesn’t want to see Gustav for what he is, and she also has a lot of contempt for herself.”

It’s a dynamic that prompted the actor to examine her own relationship to her craft, which she’s been honing since the late 2000s but only really took wing under Trier, who wrote The Worst Person in the World for Reinsve after casting her in a bit-part role for Oslo, August 31st a decade prior. “What drives someone to perform, and go into all this grief and pain? I think it’s a really complex, almost philosophical question,” says Reinsve. “There is something in movies that go into that darkness where I always feel less alone after watching them. And when I started out as an actor, I would do that very subconsciously; I could access things without really knowing how or why. But I no longer believe that it’s necessarily therapeutic to act these things out. You also have to find a different way to process them.”

If there’s a sense in the film that Nora is stuck in an emotional rut, Reinsve seems liberated by the success that’s followed in the wake of The Worst Person in the World. Since her time-stopping dash across Oslo introduced her to the world stage, she’s been acclaimed for her performances in Aaron Schimberg’s Kaufmanesque satire A Different Man and Armand, by Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman’s grandson Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel. Next, she has upcoming roles for Alexander Payne (Somewhere Out There) and Romanian new wave auteur Cristian Puiu (Fjord) – but there’s something about her work with Trier that seems to draw the best from them both. It’s the sort of actor-director partnership you hope to see on screen for many years to come. 

“Me too!” laughs Reinsve, who watched Opening Night, John Cassavetes’ drama with his wife and muse of many years, Gena Rowlands, as part of her prep for Sentimental Value. She remembers her brief experience on set for Oslo, August 31st, where she plays a partygoer raging deep into a Norwegian summer’s night, as “really, really exciting”. She came away thinking that this was what making movies was always going to be like – “it felt so natural and alive” – but failed to recapture that rush in the decade that followed, so much so she was about to pack it all in to become a carpenter when the call came from Trier for The Worst Person in the World. “I haven’t met anyone who has that much respect for every single piece in his productions, who really cares so much about everyone, as Joachim,” says Reinsve. “I feel like you can see that on screen, too. It’s a lot of love in his movies, a lot of care in how it’s made and all the people and all the characters in it.”

With Sentimental Value, Reinsve is hazy on the particulars of how she was approached for the role of Nora; she just says there was an “unspoken feeling” between the two that they would work together again. “We also had this game on The Worst Person in the World where we would imagine [Reinsve’s character] Julie in other situations, and that she would have darker traits, because Julie was very naive and open, and she was living in this summer night world of Oslo … I think that game started to connect these dots for him.”

Pulling on autobiographical threads in his script with co-writer Eskil Vogt (Trier’s dad was a director, his grandfather a member of the Norwegian resistance), Trier’s idea for the film began to coalesce around the father figure of Gustav, the family home which bore silent witness to their trials, and the relationship between Nora and Agnes, captured with telepathic ease by Reinsve and Lilleaas. “Inga is so grounded and so authentic in her work, so it was fun playing off really small things the other person would do and building from there,” says Reinsve. “Joachim doesn’t need to necessarily understand intellectually everything that’s going on in a scene, so you can be really subtle and uncontrollable and raw, because you know that something will occur, even if you don’t understand it in the moment.”

I tell her the scene that comes to mind here for me is when Agnes, in a quiet embrace with her sister, tells Nora that she loves her. Nora’s first response is to laugh, then apologise, then tell her she loves her too. “That was one of the moments that was improvised,” says Reinsve. “Joachim has said himself that he could never write ‘I love you’ in a script, but it just felt so natural in the moment and everyone cared so much about the scene; the DP [Kasper Tuxen Andersen] had his own personal relationship to that scene and those two sisters, and you can really see how much everyone is really wanting it to work and be as complex and nuanced as it possibly can be.” It’s an inspired moment that puts you right at the heart of the sisters’ relationship – it could almost be a scene from their childhood, replayed in the present. And in a way, says the actor, isn’t that what the whole game is about? 

“I think that’s what we all do from when we are kids; we act out situations that we can’t understand. So kids will play mother and father, or have a baby or play in the kitchen. They play all these things to learn about life. It’s a natural part of being a human. And then some of us grow up and we are still doing it! But hopefully in a more advanced way.”

Sentimental Value is out in UK cinemas on December 26.