🎬 Renate Reinsve Couldn’t Let Go of ‘Sentimental Value’ Until It Was Over
‘It’s hard going into this deep anger and grief, and then go back,’ says the star, who re-teamed with director Joachim Trier for the emotional family drama
Main Character is a series about acting and what it takes to give an impactful lead performance in film and television. The video is produced by Jennifer Laski, Ankler Media’s executive producer of brand experiences; the debut episode featured Joel Edgerton.
Renate Reinsve and Joachim Trier were coming off their collaboration on the acclaimed Oscar-nominated film The Worst Person in the World, about a young woman traversing — often failingly — her professional and romantic life. For that movie, the actor-director duo had a game, Reinsve says, of how dark her character could go.
But for their next project, Sentimental Value, Trier gave Reinsve, 38, a weightier challenge.
“He wanted to write someone who was more mature and had more emotional weight,” the Norwegian actress says in the newest episode of Main Character, Ankler Media’s latest video series focused on the top actors in the game. “That’s how he started, and then when I got the role and the script, I knew that’s where he wanted to go.”
Sentimental Value is about actress Nora Berg (Reinsve) as she and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), reunite with their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), an acclaimed director who wants Nora to star in his next film.
Trier came in with broad notions of Reinsve’s character — her depth, her sadness, her flaws. Still, after filming rehearsals with the actors, the director rewrote the script, as he often does, to tailor the roles to the people playing them.
“He’ll rewrite the script to what is coming out of the dynamic between the actors and what’s coming from us,” Reinsve, who has also starred in the Apple TV series Presumed Innocent and A24’s A Different Man, says of the process. “It becomes very personal to everyone. And it’s not just the actors; it’s the DP, it’s sound — everyone is very engaged in creating on set. The movie becomes the collective of who’s involved.”
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As loose as the character’s development was, inhabiting Nora was a complex, emotional task that often took a toll on Reinsve.
“It’s not like I do the method thing, but it does affect you,” she says of playing the movie’s emotional turns. “It’s hard to switch on and off, going into this deep anger and grief, and then go back.”
In fact, there would be times between takes when Trier would ask Reinsve if they could try something differently. The actress would reply with anger, she says. “Yes! Yes, we can try something else!” She didn’t mean to react that way — but she was filled with the frustration and sadness Nora was going through.
So on the last day of shooting, when it was all said and done, Reinsve felt like “a thousand kilos were lifted off my shoulders,” she says.
“I was free of being in that mode,” Reinsve adds. Yet still, she “had to explore that [terrain] to make it authentic.”
Sentimental Value is now playing in theaters.