Renate Reinsve on vomit-inducing reviews and 19-minute standing ovations: ‘You feel your face go stiff from smiling so long’

O ne day in July 2021, Renate Reinsve got up, read the Guardian and promptly vomited. It was - mostly - a happy kind of hurl. The Norwegian actor was at Cannes, where The Worst Person in the World had premiered the previous evening. Joachim Trier’s film, which follows Julie, a young woman on a capricious yet uncompromising quest for meaning and happiness, was the first Reinsve had ever starred in. During the screening, she decided “this movie is great, but I am shit !” Hours later she was confronting the possibility that she might be one of the greatest actors of her generation. This newspaper’s verdict - “A star is born” - was, she said, “too much to process, so I just started puking. My whole image of myself and what I could do just changed instantly.” Renate Reinsve … ‘I thought that my last film would be my downfall – and then it wasn’t that bad.’Photograph: Carlotta Cardana/The Guardian Reinsve and Inga-Ibsdotter-Lilleaas in Sentimental Value.Photograph: Kasper-Tuxen-Andersen Value added … Renate Reinsve.Photograph: Carlotta Cardana/The Guardian Oslo motion … Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World.Photograph: Kasper Tuxen/AP Reinsve went on to win the best actress prize at the festival. Her performance would later be shortlisted for a Bafta and a slew of other awards (the film itself received two Oscar nominations). The accolades certainly helped on the self-esteem front, but the 38-year-old knew she mustn’t let the acclaim go to her head. “I was very overwhelmed and then I sat with it and was like: OK, I need to keep a distance to this somehow,” she recalls, sitting on the sofa in a cavernous hotel suite in Soho, London. “You can’t take criticism too personally and you can’t take praise too personally.” Such affirmation, I imagine, must become addictive. “Yes. And everything in life shall pass. So the aim was to keep everything a little bit even and keep the image I have of myself intact.” Serene, meticulously self-effacing and aspirationally Scandi-chic in brown denim and black loafers, Reinsve is about as far from the archetypal fame monster as you could possibly imagine. For fans of The Worst Person in the World, this will be welcome news. The film’s brilliance hinged on the rare relatability of its protagonist, a combination of the character’s frustrated search for fulfilment - too many professional epiphanies; initially euphoric but ultimately disappointing relationships - and the actor’s unaffectedly vivacious and profoundly layered performance. Her smile alone is a portal to an entire interior universe. Reinsve and Inga-Ibsdotter-Lilleaas in Sentimental Value. Photograph: Kasper-Tuxen-Andersen It didn’t take long for Reinsve to notice that people were identifying hard with Julie. On an early press round, she encountered a fortysomething interviewer who “was a little bit agitated [that] someone in her 30s was telling her story. Like: how do you know how I feel? And then the next [journalist] was in his 20s and he was like, I just want to say: This is me.” The...

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