Renate Reinsve, the actress who was one day away from quitting

Renate Reinsve

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 24, 1987 Solbergelva, Drammen, Norway
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Backrooms, The Worst Person in the World, Sentimental Value
Awards	Cannes Film Festival · Amanda · European Film · Hedda

The plan was already made. Renate Reinsve, worn out by the parts she was being offered in Norway, had decided to stop acting, move to Italy and learn carpentry, with the idea of one day running a woodworking school for girls and women. The next day Joachim Trier phoned to tell her he was writing a script with her in mind. That script became The Worst Person in the World, and the woman who came close to trading the stage for a workbench is now wanted by European auteurs and an American horror studio for the same quality: she can make a character’s hesitation look like the most active thing on screen.

She grew up in Solbergelva, a small community on the river outside Drammen, west of Oslo, where she was born. Diagnosed with ADHD as a child, she found in theatre the one thing that could hold her attention completely. School held it less well. She was expelled at sixteen and left Norway for Scotland, where she worked behind the bar of a hostel in Edinburgh. The detour ended at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and from there on the stage, first at Trøndelag Teater in Trondheim and later at Det Norske Teatret in Oslo.

Theatre gave her the recognition first: in 2014 she won a Hedda Award, Norway’s leading theatre prize, for a staging of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, two years before joining Det Norske Teatret. Her first film appearance had been almost nothing. In Trier’s Oslo, August 31st, released in 2011 when she was 23, she had a single line, “Let’s go to the party”, and the director kept her in mind. Through the following decade she worked steadily in Norwegian film and television, in a horror sequel, a refugee comedy and youth series, without finding a screen part that matched what she was doing in the theatre. It was that run of supporting roles, by her own account, that pushed her towards the carpentry plan.

Trier and his co-writer Eskil Vogt built Julie around her: a woman in Oslo who switches studies, partners and ambitions across twelve chapters, and whom the title calls the worst person in the world as a joke on her own self-judgement. The Worst Person in the World premiered in competition at Cannes in 2021, and Reinsve won the festival’s Best Actress award. The role brought her the Amanda Award, Norway’s national film prize, and a BAFTA nomination, and the film was picked up around the world as a portrait of a generation unable to choose.

What followed was a spread of choices rather than a cash-in. In 2024 alone she appeared in five very different projects: the Norwegian grief drama Handling the Undead, adapted from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel by Thea Hvistendahl; Piero Messina’s science-fiction romance Another End, opposite Gael García Bernal; Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, as Ingrid, the playwright who lives next door to Sebastian Stan’s disfigured actor; Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s Armand, a single-afternoon school confrontation that won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and earned her a European Film Award nomination; and Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent, as the prosecutor Carolyn Polhemus opposite Jake Gyllenhaal.

Not all of it served her. The Julie role left a label she has had to work against: international coverage turned her into the face of millennial indecision, a reading that flattens a performance whose force lies in Julie’s appetite rather than her drift. And the English-language industry’s first instinct was to cast her as the woman a man’s story turns around. In Presumed Innocent she is the murdered colleague whose affair with Gyllenhaal’s prosecutor drives the plot, seen mostly in flashback; in A Different Man she is the person two men measure themselves against. She was sharp in both, but both parts were written from the outside. Armand, which follows her character through one long afternoon of accusations at her son’s school, showed what happens when a film is built from her point of view instead.

The fuller answer came from Trier again. In Sentimental Value she plays Nora Borg, an Oslo stage actress whose estranged father, the film director Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, returns with a script he wants her to star in. When she turns it down, he gives the part to an American star played by Elle Fanning. Nora’s stage fright, which the film shows in the opening stretch, is one of the most physical things Reinsve has put on screen. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2025 and collected nine Oscar nominations, and in March 2026 it became the first Norwegian film to win Best International Feature. Reinsve was nominated for Best Actress, an award that went to Jessie Buckley for Hamnet, after Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and a European Film Award win for the same role.

The months since have pulled her in two directions at once. In May, Fjord, Cristian Mungiu’s drama about a Romanian evangelical family whose move to a remote Norwegian town brings accusations that they are harming their children, won the Palme d’Or, with Reinsve as Lisbet, the Norwegian wife of Sebastian Stan’s Mihai. Six days later Backrooms, the first feature by the 20-year-old YouTube filmmaker Kane Parsons, opened in American cinemas with Reinsve as Dr. Mary Kline, the therapist who follows Chiwetel Ejiofor’s furniture-store owner into an endless maze of empty rooms. It has since passed $400 million worldwide, the biggest result in A24’s history. The same actress now carries a Palme d’Or film and a mass-market horror hit in the same summer, and plays neither of them as a star turn.

Away from sets, she shares a son with the animator Julian Nazario Vargas.

Autumn brings a third face of the same year. Butterfly, Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s drama about two estranged half-sisters who grew up at a resort on Gran Canaria, reached Norwegian cinemas in late September after premiering at the Rotterdam festival, with Reinsve as Lily, a former model. Fjord opens in the United States through Neon on 9 October. And since mid-September she has been shooting Mia Hansen-Løve’s If Love Should Die, starting in Gothenburg, as Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century writer who resolved to live by her pen after losing her post as a governess, in a production that runs until mid-December across five countries. The woman who once had a workshop in Italy planned as her way out is spending the winter playing someone who refused the life she had been assigned.