“Acting is a very tough business”: Lena Olin, Tora Hallström and Lasse talk family set life

For the last few years, the Olin-Hallströms have been a throuple. That is to say that Lena Olin and Lasse Hallström have contended with a third figure in their marriage – a woman so enigmatic that, according to Lena, her film director husband has been entirely “obsessed”, scouring libraries for every book, searching for every morsel of knowledge so he could better understand the focus of his fixation. Thoughts of her, and what makes her tick, have lingered over the dinner table, overpowering family discussions all through lockdown and beyond, and her presence has even been felt on their film sets.

The woman in question has been dead for 78 years. But there is rhyme to the madness. Such is life when you’re taking on a film project as a family – with Lena and daughter Tora Hallström playing the same titular character, the pioneering Swedish abstract artist, Hilma af Klint, at different stages of her life, and Lasse directing them both. Hugely under-appreciated in her own time, af Klint has become the object of all their obsessions.

It was Lena who first stumbled across the artist and her vibrant works a number of years ago, whilst on a flight watching the 2016 psychological thriller Personal Shopper, where Kristen Stewart’s character comes into contact with af Klint’s art. When she landed, Lena told Lasse about af Klint and he immediately “got hooked on her life story”, he says. Lasse worked on the script on and off for two or three years, returning to it again and again between projects. And then, when lockdown hit, the family couried in together at their home outside New York, where the work could really begin.

“A lot of the ideas were born during quarantine when it was just the three of us in a house in Bedford, where we would just sit and talk about the script and it felt so small – like it would just stay with us,” says Tora. “But then seeing it turn into this real thing, that's so big in so many ways, it was so surreal.”

When we meet, the mother-daughter pair are nestled together on a wooden bench on the sun-dappled front porch of their summer house in the leafy seaside town of Falsterbo, on Sweden’s so-called Riviera. Their beloved dogs Bradley (Cooper) and Cezanne run about their feet and play happily together in the family’s front garden, amusing the crew who have been well satiated on cinnamon buns and coffee, brewed by the matriarch herself.

Related: A family affair: Holzweiler has become the first family of Norwegian fashion

For Lena and Tora, taking on the titular role and playing the same woman at differing stages of her life took some coordination. Lena has been acting since she was in her teens and has played the role of an artist multiple times before – first as Sabina in Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and notably as Claire Smythson in Tom Dolby’s Artist’s Wife. So presumably she was chomping at the bit to impart some words of wisdom and advice to her young daughter. “I thought I would contribute more, since I know a lot. I thought, ‘The day my daughter is gonna do this, I'm going to whisper in her ear’,” she says. "But she sort of did her own thing, and that was both rewarding and it was like, ‘OK, no one needs my advice here’.

“It was so great to see her fly without me saying: ‘This is how you do it’,” Olin continues. “But then we could talk about things and I felt I could be very straight with you.” She turns to face Tora, “I was never afraid of saying, ‘This is how I would play it .’ And sometimes you would say, ‘That's a good idea,’ And sometimes you would say, ‘Just back off, I can't hear this right now’.”

Constructing this shared notion of af Klint was very much a joint effort between the two women, who between themselves agreed upon who the artist was, how she talked and how she moved, determining together “the music in her”, as Lena puts it. “I used to enjoy going to set and watching what Tora did, so I could sort of get to know [Hilma] through your performance, actually,” she adds.

Playing the same character is an intimate experience, even for a mother and daughter pair who are clearly very close, and sharing the role enabled them to not just learn more about af Klint, but also about each other. When she’s acting, Tora says, her voice full of admiration, her mum “just lets go of all control and just surprises everyone around herself”.

“I think doing this [film] made me want to be more like her in a way. Growing up, I saw her as very sensitive and flighty, and every thing was a big deal – she was so dramatic, and I was like, ‘How do you live like that? How?’,” she says. “When you grow up with such sensitive parents, you kind of become this rational ‘business person’ and I've been living that life for so long – I was bored of myself being like that without knowing it.”

Though Tora, now in her twenties, has essentially grown up on movie sets – she was just three months old when the family went to New York as Lena began working on Sidney Lumet’s Night Falls in Manhattan - Hilma is her first significant role, following earlier parts in Hachi: A Dog's Tale in 2009 and later Safe Haven, in 2013. Before the pandemic, she had been living and working as Uber’s Regional Operations Manager in San Francisco, but then the world turned upside down.

Leaving the city for the family home meant she had a lot of time to ponder her direction. It turned out lockdown was the catalyst she needed to find her way back into acting. “I just didn't feel like a corporate person that could be put together and do all these numbers. It just didn't interest me anymore,” she says. “And then I found this book in my house called The Actor's Art and Craft, and I asked my parents, ‘Did you guys put this here? I don't remember buying this’.”

Quite the contrary, says Lasse, when we Zoom a few weeks later. “I've been trying, not to discourage, but I haven't really encouraged Tora's acting career because it's such a fickle business – you're in the hands of other people's whims... And I didn't want that for Tora.” Lena, on the other hand, says she isn’t concerned about her daughter following in her footsteps. “If she were another personality, I would worry,” she says, “because it's a tough business. It’s a very tough business. But with her personality, I feel very confident.”

Parts of Hilma were shot in Sweden, with ten days filming in Dalarö, while the rest took place in Lithuania. Great pains were taken to recreate the artist’s work, mix the correct pigments and to even have Tora learn how to paint and sketch like af Klint once did, with a pen attached to a long bamboo stick. The days were long and exhausting, says Lena, but the trio would get together on weekends, in between dog walks, and practise the following week’s scenes.

For intimate scenes with Tora and Catherine Chalk, who plays Anna Cassel, one of four women artists with whom af Klint established The Five (a spiritualistic group that conducted séances and other rituals), they had an intimacy coordinator on set. Certainly there are perks of having family members in the film biz, but having your parents as witness to your love scenes can’t be one of them. Weren’t those moments a little awkward?

Related: Introducing Fanny Leander Bornedal: The young Danish talent on role models, heartbreak and her dream wardrobe

“I thought it would be,” says Tora. “In Sweden we're very culturally open with all that kind of stuff. It's not weird for us, but I was like, ‘Maybe other people will see this as weird.’” Though Tora was unfazed, someone else on set quickly made themselves scarce when those moments rolled around. “My dad would go to his trailer and sit,” she laughs. Lena adds: “They were shooting the scene and I was like ‘Oh it's so beautiful’, and I'm like, ‘Where's Lasse?,’ ‘He's having lunch.’”

Another type of feverishness was often at play during the filming of Hilma – spiritualism. The dance of communing with the spirits was something that was central to the artist and her four female friends, who were all enthralled by the occult. And so, throughout the process of filming, all the leading actors and actresses had séances with a local medium, Benny Rosenquist.

Rosenquist “connected” with af Klint, helping the cast to better understand and communicate with her. “She was speaking through him, so we got to get an actual taste of how she communicated,” explains Tora. “And whenever he spoke to her, he would get so much energy.” As a result, Lasse has become entranced by thoughts of life’s bigger questions, choosing to consult Rosenquist for other upcoming film projects, too.

One question that he of course had to pose to the notoriously private af Klint (via Benny): Did she mind all this fuss and fanfare? Who knows, perhaps a feature film was not quite what she had in mind. “ We ended up sitting with a medium, asking him, ‘Is she OK with us making this film?’” says Lasse. “And there wasn't a direct answer, the answer that came wasn't no and there wasn't a yes. But the fact that she liked the idea of Tora in the part, according to the medium, was proof enough that we were supported.”

Lasse also drew on support from his family, even if going to work all day, every day with your other half wouldn’t be for everyone. For Lena and Lasse, who have been married since 1994, it was a dream; one that, according to the director, “just adds charm and spice” to the whole process of filming. It presented only one practical difference for their relationship: “For a change I was in command entirely,” explains Lasse. “Or at least I felt like it.”

So what’s their secret to such a long lasting love? According to someone who has had ring side seats, it’s actually rather simple. “They're very different personalities, they definitely balance each other out well,” says Tora. “I went to boarding school for high school, and every time parents would pick their kids up, just one parent would come because it's a long car ride. But my parents would always come together, they always wanted to be together.”

Related: All the Scandi films that have ever won an Oscar

She turns to her mother. “There's never any blow up fight because you don't bottle things up. I think that gives my dad a lot of respect for my mom.” When they are away from set, the family spend time in their Falsterbo summer house, a place that carries special importance to the whole Olin family, past and present. This is the very place that Lena’s father, Stig, an adoptee, discovered his biological parents were originally from.

“He found out that his family is from here, so we have a family home here. My biological grandfather is buried at Skanör, which is the twin city to Falsterbo and my dad's biological cousin lives across the street,” says Lena. “I feel that I get more Swedish when I'm here – it sort of wakes up the Swedishness in me.” They play golf, walk the dogs and cook; Lasse is vegan – a preference which has inspired an affectionate family nickname amongst Tora and her friends: ‘The Hummus King’. Lena, meanwhile, is the one with the sweet tooth: “I’m the queen of fika – I could fika all day long, that’s all I want to do.” It’s a classic case of opposites attracting – the Hummus King, the Fika Queen and Tora.