Frida Gustavsson, the Swedish actress who refuses to be decorative on screen

Frida Gustavsson

Photo: Kevin Payravi / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 6, 1993 Stockholm, Sweden
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Icefall, Dampyr
Awards	European Shooting Stars, Berlin International Film Festival · Elle Sweden Model of the Year

Frida Gustavsson once summed up what modelling had felt like from the inside in one line: “You’re the vessel for other people’s creativity.” She was among the most requested faces on the international runways when she said it was over, an opener of a Valentino couture show in Paris and a regular in the pages of Vogue. Her agents took it calmly. They assumed she meant the usual exit, the pretty girlfriend in a studio comedy. She meant something slower: going home to Stockholm and enrolling in theatre school.

The career she has built since reads as a long argument with the decorative part. She has played the Viking warrior Freydís Eiríksdóttir in Vikings: Valhalla and the young Marianne of Ingmar Bergman‘s Faithless in Tomas Alfredson’s series, and she says she turns down action films in which the woman exists to stand beside the male hero. The test of that position is her next job. Mike White has cast her in The White Lotus, a satire whose whole engine is watching rich, beautiful people very closely.

She was born in Stockholm on 6 June 1993 and grew up in a suburb of the city, the daughter of a teacher and a salesman. Sport came first. She ran, hurdled and long-jumped with the Olympics in mind until a knee injury at 14 ended the plan. She has described herself as a “little theater monkey kid” who cast her brothers as backup dancers in home-made music videos, and then puberty made her very tall and very self-conscious, and the urge to perform went quiet.

Fashion found her in what she calls “the most Swedish thing ever”: a scout spotted her in an IKEA store while she was shopping with her father. She began working locally in 2008 and moved to Japan the same year. By the spring 2010 season she was the fourth most requested model on the circuit, and German Vogue put her on its March cover. Elle Sweden named her Model of the Year in 2011, the same June she graduated from St. Martins Gymnasium in Sundbyberg. In 2012 she opened Valentino’s haute couture show and walked the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show; Maybelline signed her as a face the following year, and Nina Ricci used her for its fragrance.

She stepped back around 2015. In a 2022 interview with Nylon she recalled that her agents “pictured it more as like Kate Upton — be the hot girl in Adam Sandler movies.” She studied at theatre school for several months and started auditioning for film. Her first lead came in Swoon (Eld & lågor, 2019), Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein’s romance about the heirs to two rival amusement parks, opposite Albin Grenholm and Pernilla August. The same year she appeared in a single episode of The Witcher as Visenna, the mother of Geralt of Rivia. Ronnie Sandahl then cast her as Vibeke in Tigers (Tigrar, 2021), the story of a 16-year-old Swedish football prodigy sold to Inter Milan, and she joined the Italian comic-book adaptation Dampyr (2022) as Tesla Dubček.

The part that carried her name abroad was Freydís. Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla, created by Jeb Stuart as a sequel to Vikings, ran for three seasons between 2022 and 2024, with Gustavsson as the shieldmaiden sister of Leif Erikson, played by Sam Corlett. The first season was shot in coastal Ireland on sets crowded with extras and animals. She told Nylon what drew her to the character: “She doesn’t say anything unless she needs to. She’s incredibly loyal and she demands her space.”

The friction in her story is that the label she walked away from still does much of the selling. Almost every international profile introduces her as the model turned actress, and the publicity around Vikings: Valhalla leaned hard on her physical training. She has pushed back in plain terms, saying that if she wanted to be perceived as beautiful she would still be modelling. Her own rule also has a cost. During the Berlin Film Festival in 2025 she told the Swedish news agency TT that she had just turned down two major international productions, adding that “in the end, Hollywood is a budget.” Her screen work outside Scandinavia remains slim: one episode of a fantasy series, a comic-book adaptation, a supporting role in the winter thriller Icefall with Joel Kinnaman. The refusal reads as integrity, and it also keeps her off the lists that make international names.

The role that best supports her argument came at home. Alfredson’s Faithless (Trolösa) is a six-part SVT series built from the Bergman screenplay that Liv Ullmann filmed in 2000. Gustavsson plays the young Marianne Vogler opposite Gustav Lindh and August Wittgenstein, while Lena Endre, who was Marianne in Ullmann’s film, plays the older woman. The series premiered in Sweden in January 2025, and the following month she was presented as Sweden’s European Shooting Star at the Berlinale. “It’s not a Bergman biopic,” she said there. “We’re telling our version.”

On 30 October 2026 Netflix released A Couple of Lies (Bytet), a four-part thriller directed by Kasper Barfoed from Stefan Ahnhem’s novel. She plays Helene, who with her husband Carl, played by Fares Fares, swaps a house in the Stockholm archipelago for a villa in Sicily belonging to a couple played by Emma Appleton and Jakob Oftebro. Neither home turns out to be what the listing promised.

Away from the set she keeps a short public record. An early marriage to the photographer Hjalmar Rechlin ended in divorce, and in 2022 she married Marcel Engdahl at Storkyrkan, Stockholm’s cathedral. She lives in the city.

Her casting in the fourth season of The White Lotus was reported in March 2026, and HBO’s production announcement lists her alongside Laura Dern, Steve Coogan, Vincent Cassel and Ben Kingsley. The season was filmed on the French Riviera and follows a week of hotel guests and staff during the Cannes Film Festival; her character has not been revealed, and no premiere date has been set, though Vogue Scandinavia expects the season in 2027. The season is set where the fashion and film businesses share one red carpet, and she has now worked on both sides of it.