Victoria Carmen Sonne on her sexuality, shoplifting and her new film, Miss Osaka

Victoria Carmen Sonne doesn't hold back.

The Danish indie actress, best known for her soul-stirring portrayal of a young woman caught up in an abusive relationship with a drug lord in 2018’s Holiday, tends to let her work speak for itself. We’ve met for dinner to discuss her latest cult triumph, Miss Osaka, in which she plays a wayward woman who steals the passport of her Japanese doppelgänger and disappears to start a new life in, well, Osaka.

But Carmen Sonne, “Vic,” as her friends call her, has other plans. “I’ve been super private, to be honest,” she says. “But maybe I’m going to open up a little more today. Maybe I’m ready to speak a little more about me.”

We’re sitting at a table outside the hip French brasserie Pastis in the actress’ native Copenhagen – the same restaurant where she celebrated her 27th birthday a few months prior. It’s pouring with rain, but we’re protected by the awning, under the glow of some heat lamps. She lights up a cigarette, the first of many. “F*** it, let’s go,” she says.

Carmen Sonne got her first job at the Danish drugstore chain Matas when she was 12 because she “wanted to earn money to buy alcohol.” A few storefronts down was Playtime Video. “It was a shitty version of Blockbuster,” she explains. Bored of hawking soaps and toilet paper, Carmen Sonne went down the street into the derelict DVD rental joint and asked for a job.

“We didn’t have that many customers,” she says. “So I had quite a lot of time on my hands to just hang out and watch films.” One film in particular caught her eye, the Danish drama Daisy Diamond starring then-indie actress Noomi Rapace. A few weeks later, Carmen Sonne was taking the bus to school when she came across an ad in the paper for an open casting call to star in the forthcoming feature by the same director. “I had never acted before,” she says. “I had never even thought about it.”

So she went to shoot her shot. Though she was just 14, she didn’t even bother telling her parents. “My upbringing was pretty liberal,” she says, by way of explanation. The audition experience left something to be desired. “I didn’t know what to expect, but I just expected it to be something,” she says. Instead, Carmen Sonne waiting around for ages with a bunch of other young hopefuls, only to receive an audience with the casting director for, “like, ten seconds.” She would, of course, go on to get the part in the teen romance musical Magi i luften. “It’s a horrible film, by the way,” she quips.

Still, she fell in love with the process of filmmaking. “I thought it was so interesting – how I could experience the world through this other person,” she says. One scene in particular stuck with her; a love scene. “She was in love with this guy, but he was a gay guy,” she says. “It’s kind of funny when you think about it, for me, as a gay person. I could super relate without even realising it, because I was in denial.”

She takes a bite of the gratinated scallops that have arrived at our table and washes it down with a swig of Riesling. “F***, that’s good,” she exclaims.

Carmen Sonne had two significant heterosexual relationships before she came to the realisation that she was gay. “It’s fluid and it takes a while,” she says. “I guess you would say I’m perceived as a pretty feminine person, because I’m small and I like to put on makeup and wear heels sometimes. I love my jewellery – all of those things that we connect to being feminine. We connect feminine to women and we connect women to being interested in men.” Today, Carmen Sonne wears a brown leather jacket from quintessential Danish brand Ganni with skinny jeans. A newly purchased mint green Prada bag hangs off her chair.

Her first serious relationship was at 19, with a guy she describes as “one of the best people I’ve ever met.” They were together for a year. “When I was with him, I didn’t feel that I was unfaithful to my true self, because that’s where I was at the time,” Carmen Sonne says. “When I was with guys, they were always pretty buff. I was always finding these super masculine guys.”

The second relationship wasn’t as idyllic. “After my really nice boyfriend, I had my second and last boyfriend,” she says. “Let’s put it this way: it was super abusive and super f*****g heteronormative.” She “learned a lot” from this experience, particularly about the potential toxicity of traditional gender roles. Years later, she would draw on this relationship for Holiday, which, if you have seen the film and the horrors her character endures at the hands of her partner, is a chilling admission.

“I had to take this journey to reach a point where I’m like, ‘OK, I don’t really see myself in a relationship with a man ever again,’” she says. She’s just started seeing someone new, but one of the few things Carmen Sonne won’t reveal is her name. “…But I’m sort of a little bit in love,” she says.

Carmen Sonne is a balls to the wall, let’s really go for it sort of person. Few experiences are off limits. Take, for example, her stint as a shoplifter. “I’d go with my sister and cut alarms out of clothes at Miss Sixty,” she says. “I was really good at it.” At 15, this was acceptable as adolescent rebellion, but, when she revived the habit at 19, it was quite a different story.

“I went to this mall and I had a meltdown,” she admits. “I saw this guard and he was following me and I just started to play a game with him. I went into different dressing rooms and put more and more clothes on. I put on an Adidas hoodie and Dior glasses, like a weird disguise. He was still following me and I was like, ‘Come get me f****r.’” It didn’t end well. “He caught me in the parking lot and called the cops. I tried to tell a story like I was Winona Ryder researching for a character.” She never shoplifted again.

This impulse to try anything and commit all the way is what makes Carmen Sonne such an unusual and beguiling onscreen presence. Her performances have the tendency to make the viewer uncomfortable, sometimes via their sexual explicitness, other times simply because of their naked emotion. In Miss Osaka, there is a karaoke scene that is heart-wrenching. “If I engage, I engage and I go one hundred percent,” she says. “If a director has me, I’m going to go to the end of the f*****g world and even further.”

Her performance style – the fearlessness and unsettling sense of dread, the willingness to perform in set pieces that few others would dare to take on reminds me of only one other actress: Isabelle Huppert. There is the sense that Carmen Sonne could break through at any moment – she loves doing the indie, film festival thing but she’s open to other opportunities. “I’m pretty much up for anything, as long as it’s honest to whatever it is,” she says. “Mission Impossible, bring it on.”

It was only fitting that alongside an interview in which she revealed so much, Carmen Sonne would star in an editorial that was similarly personal. Shot a couple days after our dinner at Bakken, Copenhagen’s lesser known amusement park and one of the actress’ favourite places in the city, the images depict Vic alongside some of her closest friends. “I have friends from all over,” she says. DJs, jewellery designers, models and artists who get sucked up into her orbit. “I have so many creative friends who really inspire me.”

After the shoot wraps, Carmen Sonne meets me at a dinner for the Danish brand Han Kjøbenhavn at Punk Royale, a smoke-filled restaurant that takes the piss out of multi-course fine dining. We eat caviar off of our hands. At the afterparty, in a sweltering loft, it seems that Carmen Sonne knows everyone in Copenhagen. They’re all equally enchanted by the girl who never holds back.

Miss Osaka is now playing in select theatres. September 9.