🎧 The Hug That Helped Make an Oscar Nominee

‘Sentimental Value’ best supporting actress contender Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas tells me how she created the film’s enduring moment

HEART & SOUL “This movie makes a lot of people very emotionally raw, and it opens up wounds that maybe you don’t really want to open up so often,” Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas tells me. (The Ankler illustration; Joe Maher/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA)

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It has been nine months since Sentimental Value premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the festival’s Grand Prix — the runner-up prize to the Palme d’Or. In that time, its breakout star, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, has learned a whole lot. She’s been a professional actor in her native Norway for a decade but says she’s never experienced anything quite like the promotional and awards campaign for Neon’s Sentimental Value, now nominated for nine Oscars — including Lilleaas in best supporting actress.

“It’s completely different from what we do in Norway,” Lilleaas tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, a conversation recorded in person at the Ankler’s Los Angeles office the day before the Oscar Nominees Luncheon. Lilleaas stopped by between other interviews and photo shoots, another breakneck day in what’s been many months of them. “It’s very strange and it’s lovely in many ways, but there’s a lot of superficial stuff to it that’s weird in a way. It’s like, how am I gonna navigate this?”

Lilleaas, 36, grew up in the small municipality of Gol with a very different idea of what an acting career might be. Though there have been press reports that her parents were actors, she tells me they actually ran a local theater workshop that rented costumes and other equipment to stage productions. The actors Lilleaas grew up around had day jobs, she says. “That was my first interaction with the theater world, amateur actors,” she says. “There was so much joy and friendship and community, so I really loved seeing that.’

She went on to study acting in a program that was heavy on physical theater, which, as she explains in our conversation, is more about being physically present within a character than anything else. In Sentimental Value, that training — and the direction from Joachim Trier — helped free her up to create what’s been one of the film’s most definitive images, in which her character lies on a bed and embraces her sister, played by Renate Reinsve.

HUG IT OUT Renate Reinsve, left, with Lilleaas in Sentimental Value. (Neon)

“ I really felt it in the moment — like, ‘Oh God, I want to hug her, but it’s not in the script, and I don’t want to ruin the take,’” Lilleaas says. “So I held back a little, but then Joachim, who’s in the room — he doesn’t sit behind the monitor, he’s looking straight at us. I think he could sense what I was feeling, so he said, ‘Go hug her.’ I got that feeling that my instincts were right. And then I felt so strongly that these characters deserve this.”

Hear that moment and much more from Lilleaas on today’s episode of the podcast, which also includes my conversation with Christopher Rosen, recorded Sunday night just after the BAFTA Awards, where some thrilling surprise wins left us with renewed questions about who might prevail at the Screen Actors Guild’s Actor Awards this weekend. Join us live on Substack and YouTube to watch the Actor Awards together this Sunday, starting at 5 p.m. PT, and we’ll have another post-show recap to share on next week’s podcast as well. See you there!

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