Renate Reinsve on what 'The Worst Person in The World' really means

Renate Reinsve was “having a cigarette and drinking a beer” in the garden when I first reached her on the phone. For some reason, I thought that was pretty cool. Not the act of doing it necessarily, but the fact that it was the first thing she said to me – an opening line that immediately made me feel like I was calling up a buddy.

“Hey, what’s up.” “Ah not much, just sitting in the garden, having a cigarette and drinking a beer.”’ And yet, just a couple of days prior to our first call she had been on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, attending the ceremony where she picked up the award for Best Actress. Quite an achievement for a Norwegian actress who had never had a major role in a movie before.

Reinsve received the accolade for her portrayal of Julie in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in The World. Until her breakout role in this dark romantic drama, her career had been stalling. She joined theatre school as a teenager and had found success on the Norwegian stage. She’d also had TV roles but was struggling to get the parts she wanted. She decided it might be time to consider a new career. “I wanted to do something completely different [from acting] and just have a break. When I finally decided to take a break, I remember my body was relieved,” she says. “And then the next day Joachim called me for this role.”

Destiny? Fate? Coincidence? Who cares, it’s a great story. Trier called on Reinsve for this role because he had worked with her before on his film Oslo, August 31st all the way back in 2011. Reinsve had spent nine days with him on set, all for a mere minute on screen. But that minute had stuck with Trier for the next decade – he couldn’t get her out of his head. Having spent some time talking with the actress, I begin to see why.

“I always wondered why the hell is Norwegian film so messed up that she hasn't had a star role yet?” Trier told AFP. “It's so stupid I thought, let's make a movie with her.” Trier – with his long term writing partner Eskil Vogt – wrote the film specifically with her in mind.

The Worst Person in the World tells the tale of Julie. It’s a coming of age story – albeit one that starts a little later in life – that delves into both age-old and modern-day questions. Am I with the right person or am I just settling? Do I want kids or is it just because my partner does? Is this really my dream career?

In today’s world, the options are too plentiful, the ability to change your mind too easy. “We can choose for so long now. You can be whatever you want to be for so long,” says Reinsve. “And I think it's a very privileged situation to be in, but I think people get kind of unsettled and lonely by not knowing what to choose because you can choose basically anything at any time.”

The Worst Person in the World is actually about Julie trying to find herself, to shake off the paralysis of indecision that comes with infinite possibilities. “She's trying to find it through different men and styles,” explains Reinsve. “And this is the light stuff – the way she tries to find herself. Then she is faced with a lot of very serious issues that you have in life.”

The story is a romance story – broken into a dozen chapters – between Julie and the slightly older comic book writer, Aksel. Yet the film doesn’t focus on the romance of early courtship but rather the sometimes small, sometimes life-changing errors of judgement. The angry outbursts or drunken mistakes that keep us awake with guilt and regret. The shame that emerges late at night or when we are at our most insecure. And it is for these moments that the film is named.

“We have a saying in Norway that if you fuck up or you do something terrible, you say like, ‘You're the worst person in the world,’” says Reinsve. “It's not like the most evil person, but more like the person who sees herself as the worst person in the world. It’s like self-loathing – she dislikes herself in a lot of ways. And I don't know, I can relate to that.”

A lot of us can relate to that – and that's what makes the film so beautifully punishing. It resonates with all of us and touches on moments in our lives that perhaps would be more comfortable to forget (or at least kept locked away, only to be opened on those dark, sleepless nights). Those moments when we cheated on someone we loved and felt like the worst person in the world. Those mornings after, where memories push through fog of the night before, and make us feel like the worst person in the world.

That time when we walked away from a relationship, knowing that we would break a heart that would never heal – and making us feel like the worst person in the world. Those points in life that make us truly feel like the worst. Trier’s film tugs wonderfully on these painful experiences, pulling them out from under the bedsheets and exposing them to the light.

“A lot of people are lonely and feel a lot of shame and feel outside of everything and don't know how to belong and that they fuck up everything all the time. So I think that's why it's an important story to tell. And I think a lot of people really relate to the role because of that. Because a lot of people feel like that,” says Reinsve. Although Julie rarely actually does anything particularly bad, it's Reinsve’s performance that stabs you through the heart – and occasionally brings a tear to the eye.

We all fall in love with Julie quite early on in the film. She is the pleasure-seeking girl that smiles at you in a way where you can’t quite tell if she’s flirting or not. The girl we all met at a party once and still regret not asking for her number. “He knew I can be funny and cheerful and happy,” Reinsve says of Trier. “But underneath there is some kind of self-criticism, and a lot of shame and a lot of loneliness and sadness.”

Reinsve grew up an hour and a half outside Norway’s capital of Oslo, in a small village called Solbergelva. “It's just basically a road. Like, we had a bank, but it was closed and we had a school and we had a shop. But that was it,” she says. It was like many small town communities. Those that could, escaped to the big city; those that stayed, had babies.

“I had good friends, but I didn't have a good life when I was young. When I joined thetheatre group, I could be who I wanted to be, and also actually try to understand all the not so good stuff that happened to me, through trying to understand the roles I played.” Reinsve left home when she was 16 and ran away – not quite to the circus – but to Edinburgh, Scotland, where tickets were cheap and she knew the city from a previous stint at the Fringe Festival.

“I just walked around asking for jobs. And then the hostel I stayed in, they felt really sorry for me because they saw my struggle. And when my money ran out, there was a note on my door saying to come down to the reception. The boss of the hostel asked me, ‘so have you poured beer before?’ And I said, no. ‘Do you speak English?’ Not very well. ‘OK, but you're over 18.’ And I said no. ‘OK, fine, fine, you're hired.’ And they hired me and I worked there for a year.” She laughs, she jokes, puts on an almost passable Scottish accent – despite her discussions of darkness and deep issues, Reinsve is quick to find levity in a conversation. I can’t imagine many people not liking her and I can imagine she has broken her own fair share of hearts.

It feels hard to know where Julie ends and where Reinsve starts. Being honest with those things, she says, was one of the hardest things about this role. “We were finding things that were really uncomfortable and true – part of myself I didn’t like,” she says. She also tells me that she felt embarrassed on set. Embarrassment from how exposed she was playing this role that revealed so much about not only her, but also Trier, who had clearly lived many of the moments depicted in his film in real life. Watching them being played out became very real.

I wonder how much of this story is that of Trier’s own personal history and how much of it is hers. The glamour of winning the award, she says, must be tempered with the fact that “it's come from somewhere painful too.” “I felt really exposed, and this role came at a very good time because I haven't been that comfortable in being myself,” she says.

"Through this, I've grown up. I've done therapy and I've become more secure in being myself. I knew it was really important to go into all the stuff that I don't like about myself too. To bring that to the character. Not only the cool and funny and brave, but also the cowardly and angry and weak – the self-hatred and all the bad stuff you don't like about yourself.”

Reinsve tells me that she has always used performance as a type of therapy. “I think the drive to act was, like, figuring out stuff. It was a space to figure out stuff.” Has she found the answers she wanted? “Well, through therapy I'm figuring out more now. It's like there's so much wisdom and so much I don't know, so much reflection in drama and the place. It's been like that for me almost the whole way, actually trying to understand why people do what they do, and how people are, through trying different things and being different things, and maybe kind of trying to figure myself out.”

Whether she has figured it out or not, during our conversations, Reinsve comes across as a very happy person. She's quick to laugh and she has a casual openness about her that makes me feel we've been sharing beers in her garden for years. And right now, Reinsve is enjoying her moment in the sun. Calls are coming in, not only from fashion magazine editors, but from luxury brands looking to sign her up as an ambassador, and Hollywood producers, pushing scripts through her letterbox.

I want to know what it was like to be there at Cannes and to win the award. She was aware of the buzz around the film when she was down there, she says, but she was preparing to return to Oslo with her producer for her son’s second birthday. They were at the airport as rumours were swirling as to who would be invited back to the awards show, when they got the call.

“We were smoking cigarettes and were so nervous. We said to each other ‘if they tell us we're not in, then we just jump on a plane to go home.’” But instead, they were invited back. They went from the airport to get their hair done, and within a couple of hours they were on the red carpet. “It was very, very surreal. We didn't know what we were going to win or anything. We just knew that there might be something since we were invited back."

“When they called my name I just collapsed. And, you know, it was because Tilda Swinton was sitting in the audience. There were so many good actresses there. She's like my favourite actress and she was right there and I tried to say a few words, but my brain just collapsed.” The sheer joy that Reinsve has in retelling the story – so fresh in her mind – is humbling and infectious. The ever present- smile beams through the line and I feel suddenly like she’s my best friend.

A couple of weeks after winning the award, Reinsve flew to London to star as the lead in a film commissioned by Vogue Scandinavia. This short action story titled Cake Bomb by film director Alexi Tan sees Reinsve playing a secret agent and starring alongside some other new faces we’ve tipped to be the breakout stars of the year, including Swedish actress Alicia Agneson from the hit Netflix show Vikings, Andrew Koji, star of Snake Eyes and the soon to be released Bullet Train, Yvonne Mai, from the Vikings spin off Vikings Valhalla, and model Sandy Oghenovo.

“I heard there was a script for a Vogue shoot and I was like, ‘OK, so it's like something where I twist, turn, look dangerous and flirty.’ And then I saw like eight pages of dialogue and I was like, what is this?” laughs Reinsve. “We had fun making it – a little bit sassy, a little bit cool. And I loved the hotel. I was really enjoying myself. I had a fireplace in my room, so I would just wake up, put it on, and go back to bed.”

Surely, after winning the award her phone ringing off the hook with magazine editors and Hollywood agents? “Yeah, exactly. Like you calling, having an interview in Vogue. I have a really good agent in Hollywood now so I've been having a lot of meetings and people are also asking me to read scripts. So, practically, a lot has changed and people are walking around congratulating me and being very happy for me. But I'm also just back at my house, feeding my son and changing diapers and living exactly how I did. So yeah, I like it – it's perfect.”