NEW YORK — Some people are so open to the world that they become sensitive to all sorts of things.
Including ghosts.
This is why Renate Reinsve (pronounced Ren-AH-tuh RHINES-vuh) couldn’t stay at the same hotel as her “Sentimental Value” castmates, the actress casually tells me as we pull up to a coffee shop near her Union Square hotel, where we ended up after a series of misadventures.
She’d already been in New York for weeks when her director Joachim Trier and co-stars Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning arrived for December’s Gotham Awards, and of course would have loved to stay with them. But when she popped by their hotel, the receptionist couldn’t guarantee her a ghost-free room. (She declined to name the popular downtown spot “because people will get scared.”)
“Sometimes I’ve stayed in hotels and I’ve had, like, someone knocking on my door and there is no one there,” the 38-year-old Norwegian star says. “And I ask the reception and they say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s a ghost. Take this garlic and they won’t come into your room.’” She’s had even more harrowing experiences at a famous L.A. hotel, but doesn’t want to share details “because it sounds so insane,” she says, laughing and turning bright red.
But to Skarsgård, who at 74 has worked with everyone, Reinsve’s permeability is exactly what makes her unique, particularly among his notoriously reserved countrymen.
“What impressed me was her translucence,” he told me at the film’s New York Film Festival premiere in late September. “Her skin is absolutely see-through, and you see the emotions coming inside, and she can’t hide it. That’s why she blushes all the time … I don’t think in Scandinavia I’ve met anyone like her.”
In “Sentimental Value,” which just scored eight Golden Globe nominations and has made Reinsve a near lock for an Oscar nomination, Reinsve plays Nora, a successful avant-garde theater actress with crippling stage fright whose estranged father (Skarsgard) writes a part for her in his next film. When Nora refuses it, he hilariously miscasts an American starlet (Elle Fanning) who worships him. He then showers his ingenue with the fatherly attention that he’s so long denied Nora and her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas).
It’s a funny, wrenching film about a deeply wounded family who can only communicate, and not incredibly well it turns out, through art. And Reinsve is a mesmerizing force — early on, she’s hyperventilating backstage in a corseted gown while demanding her married lover have sex with her (or at least slap her) to quell her panic. In another bit of masterful physical comedy, Nora knocks an expensive-looking glass vase off a table when her father arrives unannounced. She catches it, then dashes out of the house, even hopping a fence while clutching it.
Norwegians get a rap for being orderly, but Reinsve seems to thrive in chaos and spontaneity — miscalculating Manhattan traffic in heavy rain, she arrives a half-hour late, grinning apologetically. The brunch restaurant Sadelle’s, where she’s been dying to eat a bagel, has already closed its kitchen and soon starts setting up for a private event. As workers dismantle the entire room around us, ripping away chairs and tables until ours is the only one standing, I grow increasingly anxious while an extremely relaxed Reinsve watches — her face lit up with a delighted smile, like a kid on Christmas Day.
That expressive face also means she can’t hide her exhaustion from doing interviews in English. She’s impressively fluent, with just a hint of an accent, but confesses that the more comfortable she gets, the more she finds herself thinking in Norwegian and having to translate the words that leave her mouth. Later, when it’s clear we need to leave Sadelle’s, we hop into a black SUV and go to a coffee shop that turns out to be closed, and then another by her hotel. On the drive, she ceases to make eye contact for 10 to 15 minutes. She abruptly ends our chat by telling me with kind but firm Nordic bluntness that she’s done and wants to go home.
Everything that makes Reinsve a luminous acting talent also makes her a terrible candidate for the gantlet of Oscar campaigning. During promotion for her breakout film with Trier — 2021’s “The Worst Person in the World” — she’d get so overwhelmed that after every week of press, she would camp in the woods outside Oslo, sometimes with her six-year-old son. (She and her ex, animator Julian Nazario Vargas, have joint custody.)
It is to her credit that of the two English words she asks me to define for her, one of them is “schmooze.”
She has no interest in blockbusters and prefers thought-provoking art house fare like 2024’s thriller-comedy “A Different Man,” which she starred in with Sebastian Stan. After shooting Apple TV’s 2024 series “Presumed Innocent,” she’s concluded that scripted television isn’t for her: too formulaic, not enough room for spontaneity.
When she promoted “Worst Person,” which earned her best actress at the Cannes Film Festival, she was often alone on the road and hid from parties because she didn’t know anyone. Her stock has since risen significantly; she’s being dressed chiefly by Louis Vuitton for her “Sentimental Value” Oscars run. Plus, she’s part of an ensemble and it’s more fun. Fanning and Skarsgård know everyone in the biz and are happy to introduce her around. The night before we met up, Reinsve was out partying with them until three in the morning.
“Yeah, there was some dancing, and me and Stellan, we always get a little tipsy, and then we declare our love for each other,” says Reinsve. “That always happens now.”
Reinsve feels so comfortable sleeping in a tent, she says, “because I grew up in the forest.” Recently she looked up the population of her hometown of Solbergelva, a village 45 minutes southwest of Oslo, because some of the residents get offended by how small she’s described it. It’s 6,000.
Each day, she would walk to her two-classroom school past farms, sometimes braving snow drifts in negative 15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperatures. The town’s bank and gas station eventually closed, she says, “because there wasn’t any point.” She and her two younger sisters played outside because “that’s the only thing you could do there.” (Later, she walks outside into driving rain without an umbrella because Norwegians are just used to that kind of thing.)
Reinsve considers herself the black sheep of the family, a natural contrarian. She was fired from her parents’ hardware store after a couple weeks because she couldn’t feign interest. She was nudged out of the Girl Scouts after she tried to make a birdhouse with too many windows and doors.
“I didn’t succumb to the rules at all. I couldn’t see the point of doing it a certain way,” she says. “And I think that was very frustrating. Especially when you’re from a small place, it’s a collective kind of importance that we do it the same way so no one sticks out.”
Theater for her wasn’t about attention-seeking or being in front of an audience, but a way to make sense of the world, to study how people react to things, how they move in their bodies. If she and her sisters were squabbling about something, she would work it out through characters in a play. When she was 14, she found an anonymous note in her wardrobe from a woman who’d seen her perform, encouraging her to go to theater school — a profound moment, she says. From then on, theater became her passion, and she was uninterested in anything else. “It’s a classic ADHD thing,” she says, laughing.
As a kid, she would often freeze onstage (“I was really not good”), but she learned to use that as a way to create tension in her characters. “It’s so truthful for people to be scared in very emotional situations,” she says, “so I can just let it be there.”
At 17, she ran away from home. The plan was go to Costa Rica, but she wound up in Edinburgh because she had been there once with a Fringe show and it was the only ticket she could afford. There, she was offered a job at the hostel where she was staying after they found out she had run out of money and was planning to sleep on the streets with a young man she had met. “I think I have a lot of adventure and playfulness in me, and in that sense, I can be a little naive,” she says.
Moving to Oslo a year later might have been the biggest turning point in a life full of them. The people she met had such deep references to movies and books and art that she felt like she was always trying to catch up — but she wanted to, desperately. “I think that feeling will never leave me, in a way,” Reinsve says.
Her first chance to appear on a big screen came in her early 20s when she auditioned for Trier’s movie, 2011’s “Oslo, August 31.” Norway’s film industry lags far behind its neighbors in Sweden and Denmark, and Trier was the only director in the country making the kind of indie films that could pull Reinsve away from theater.
She had only one line, “Let’s go to the party,” but Trier had seen something in her. “It wasn’t a big part … but she immediately struck me as someone that had a great energy,” he says.
They became friends and he kept up with her TV and stage performances. Then in 2017, Isabelle Huppert came to Norway to see Robert Wilson’s “Edda.” While in town, she grabbed coffee with Trier, who’d directed her in 2015’s “Louder than Bombs.” She told him that she had loved “the girl in the purple dress” in Wilson’s play.
“I said, ‘I know who she is, because she’s playing the lead in my next film,’” Trier says.
This would turn out to be news to Reinsve, who’d decided to quit acting.
She was getting great, fulfilling roles in theater, but she couldn’t scrape together a living. She had renovated two houses by that time, and thought she would become a carpenter or maybe get into contracting.
Then Trier texted. He and his writing partner Eskil Vogt were working on “Worst Person” with her in mind.
“It’s so crazy that it happened three days after I had, like, let go,” says Reinsve.
Later, Trier said he’d told Huppert that he had been waiting years for Reinsve to get her big break. “Then he was like, ‘Oh, it’s not coming. I’ll do it,’” Reinsve says.
Reinsve says Trier has a way of making her feel so safe on set that at some point she stops being able to tell the difference between herself and what’s on-screen. In “Worst Person,” her character Julie is on the brink of 30 and a bit of a chaos demon, leaving broken hearts and half-attempted career paths in her wake.
At the world premiere at Cannes, Reinsve felt deep shame watching herself perform as someone with “a lot of annoying traits,” she says of her first lead role.
“It was just so strange seeing someone so close to me up there. So I felt, ‘This movie is beautiful, but I am s–t.’”
She hadn’t invited her family to Cannes because she didn’t realize it was a big deal. Then the glowing reviews came in, including one from the Guardian declaring “a star is born.” She immediately started throwing up for two hours straight. “I puked because it was too much,” she says.
Trier wrote “Sentimental Value” in part because he wanted to challenge Reinsve with a more emotionally weighty role. Nora acts because it’s the only way to connect with her father, and because inhabiting other people allows her to avoid her own traumas. This time, for the Cannes premiere, Reinsve’s entire family was by her side. Afterward, they all stood outside in a circle in silence, and ever since, she says, the atmosphere among them has felt warmer. “If you can [communicate] as a family, then you’re really lucky, and please teach the rest of us how,” she says, laughing.
Hollywood’s since come knocking, bringing what she calls “this new life” where she goes to Paris Fashion Week and hangs out with the movie stars that once dazzled her on-screen. (For a forest girl, she’s adapted remarkably well.) In 2026, she’s shooting Alexander Payne’s next film in Denmark. Had her schedule worked out, she would have played Julie Garner’s part in “Weapons,” the hit indie horror movie she had wanted to do, even though she couldn’t read the whole script because it scared her too much.
It was Stan who suggested she play opposite him in “A Different Man,” her first English-language movie, after being stunned by her in “Worst Person.” She reminded him of a young Meryl Streep. “When you’re watching Meryl Streep, you can’t see the stitches,” he says. “You’re not watching a performer who’s caught up trying to impress you or show you what they’re able to do. They’re just being and it’s incredibly human and raw.”
They’ve already shot another film together, the thriller “Fjord” from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, about a Norwegian-Romanian couple who move to a small village in Norway and encounter another couple with disturbing behavior.
They filmed at the isolated Union Øye hotel, which dates to the 1890s. Stan describes it as something out of the “The Shining,” which is appropriate because Reinsve was convinced there was a ghost in her room. She confirmed it with reception, who told her that a woman had drowned herself outside the hotel after a doomed affair with a married WWI German soldier.
“I was like, ‘Renate, come on.’ And she was like, ‘No, I have to move rooms,’” Stan recalls. “I never heard anybody. Renate heard bangs in the middle of the night and all this stuff. And then we’d go to set, we’d do this intense drama, and then we’d come back and she’d be like, ‘I’m haunted by a ghost.’”
I tell Stan that she also has been haunted in New York and L.A.
“So there’s multiple ghosts in multiple cities?” he says, laughing so hard he can barely speak.
“But look,” he continues, “maybe there is something to this.”
An Irish actress he worked with, Denise Gough, told him that the job of an actor is to let things — Gough called them “muses” — live through you and communicate through you.
“Whether it’s ghosts or muses, I don’t know,” he says, “but it certainly seems to fit for her. And it seems to be working too.”
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