The very Scandi story of Amandla Stenberg: How the actress finally found her community

Amandla Stenberg has always been good at keeping secrets. When she was 12 years old, she landed a role in the film adaptation of her “favourite book in the entire world” and was sworn to absolute secrecy. “For months I couldn’t tell a single soul about it,” she says. “I didn’t even tell my sisters.” Now, over a decade after Stenberg broke the world’s heart as Rue in The Hunger Games, the 24-year-old actress finds her lips sealed once more as the lead in the much hyped series Star Wars: The Acolyte.

The parallels between the two vehicles – the sort of projects that “belong to the fans” – aren’t lost on her. “I have been reflecting on that; how this is where I’ve arrived in my life and my career having had definitive experiences within this world,” says Stenberg. “I’ve found a lot of beauty in that because it shows there’s a certain level of synchronicity in my path.” She appears on my screen in a casual striped knit (purchased via “one of those Instagram ads”) from a rental apartment in Notting Hill, where she’s been stationed during the months-long filming of Star Wars.

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Our cover shoot, which took place at Kew Gardens the day prior, was the first non-Star Wars related activity she’s enjoyed in weeks. “It was a beautiful, rare opportunity for me to leave my house and see what London has to offer,” she says. “The funniest part was hiding in the corner and getting the shot while people and their kids were just having an outing.” It’s evening in London and though Stenberg, who uses she/her and they/them pronouns interchangeably, has been shooting nonstop – night shoots, day shoots, the works – she looks positively fresh, her braids swept half up to reveal the sort of complexion that can only be described as glowing.

But we haven’t connected to chat about Star Wars (she literally can’t tell me anything about it any way). We’re here, rather, to take a deep dive into Stenberg’s Danishness. If the last name wasn’t a tip-off (though, to be fair, it’s actually a Swedish surname), Stenberg is, in fact, a Scandi; her father, Tom Stenberg, a music promoter who worked with the most beloved rock bands of the 1970s, is a Copenhagen lad through and through. Though Stenberg was born and raised in Los Angeles (her mother, writer Karen Brailsford, is a Black American, hailing from the Bronx), Danish touchstones and sensibilities permeated her childhood. “My dad raised me on a lot of Hans Christian Andersen,” she says.

Ever since her father moved back to Copenhagen amid the pandemic (“When Trump was elected, he was already thinking about returning to Denmark”), Stenberg has been further exploring her Danish side, even spending the requisite three months in Copenhagen to secure her continued citizenship. These days, she calls upstate New York home – she recently bought a house there – but she intends to visit Copenhagen with some regularity.

Stenberg’s first understanding of Danish culture came via a “heritage day” in elementary school, in which children, and occasionally their parents, get up in front of the class to discuss their cultural backgrounds (this is very much a thing in North America). “My dad would come into class and he would talk about Denmark,” she recalls. “But when I was a kid, it was kind of a vague concept to me.” To make things more tangible, her dad would take her to visit Solvang (a Danish-style village smack dab in southern California) on the weekends to enjoy the Danish architecture and pick up Danish delicacies (they also managed to find a lone Danish deli right in Los Angeles). “My dad would host Danish lunches, which I just remember being very loud,” she says. “He would buy a lot of aquavit.” Red cabbage, open-faced sandwiches and herring were all staples on the Stenberg dining table.

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The first time Stenberg went to Copenhagen, she was eight. “What I remember most from that trip, because I was so little, was honestly the Little Mermaid [statue],” she says. “That was the most exciting thing to me.” Still, despite all her father’s efforts (charming as they were), Denmark remained a “fantasy place that my dad came from”. It wasn’t until recently, when she spent those three months in Copenhagen out of “pure necessity” that she came to learn what Denmark was all about. “Now I’ve gotten to make some of my closest friends there,” she says. “I found queer community there and communities of colour that have surprised and amazed me.”

It was an idyllic Danish summer spent “swimming in the canals and going to the countryside”. She attended Black Lives Matter protests. She went to NBRO Pride, which centres around BIPoCs within the LGBTQIA+ community. “It gave me a lot of perspective on what life can be like in other places and how societies can function when they prioritise the health and wellness of the individual,” she says. In hindsight, it became clear that a lot of the values instilled in Stenberg by her parents – including the willingness to question how things operate in America – were somewhat Danish in nature. “Growing up with a Danish dad, he always provided a perspective outside the way that American society is structured,” she says.

Stenberg often used her voice, amplified by the runaway success of her acting career, for change throughout her teens. Take, for instance, her viral video Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows, in which she gives a crash course on cultural appropriation (including calling out the fashion world for its use of cornrows in editorials and on the runway). She would regularly advocate (both in public spaces and on social media) for gender parity and diversity in the workplace, speak on LGBTQIA+ visibility, and call out colourism in Hollywood - all with poise and wisdom well beyond her years. In both 2015 and 2016, she was named one of Time’s Most Influential Teens. These days, however, she adds to the conversation through her very public-facing work.

“I love to be gay on screen,” Stenberg declares. Having come out as queer a few years prior, Stenberg came out as gay in 2018. She first played a gay character in last year’s slasher satire Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. Next came My Animal, which is described as a queer werewolf movie. “It’s a bit of a catch-22 because playing queer characters and being able to explore the million facets of being queer on screen is so gratifying,” she says. “But at the same time, I don’t think I’ve made the executive decision that I will only play queer characters.” Still, she’s chuffed to find her inbox filled with offers for queer roles. “It’s just indicative of what kind of projects are being greenlit,” she says. “It’s not until recently that I’ve seen some projects in my inbox that actually normalise queer people.” What
about her Star Wars character? Of course she can’t tell me, but it’s thrilling just to speculate.

Though Stenberg has been acting since she was four years old, first appearing in Disney advertisements, she doesn’t consider this her forever job. “I don’t think that I’ll spend my entire life acting,” she says. “I don’t know what my life will contain, and that’s exciting to me.” Her interest in acting was sparked by another girl in preschool who was doing commercials. For a while, it was simply a hobby akin to her other activities: gymnastics, tap, ballet, violin. It was Stenberg’s mother, an entertainment journalist, who used her knowledge of the industry to guide her daughter though the door. At nine years old, she got an agent and started going up for film and TV roles – and just a couple years after that, she landed The Hunger Games.

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Given that she’s been in the public eye almost her entire life, I ask if she has had any aesthetic phases she especially regrets. “Probably all of them,” she says. “I had a prep phase in high school. I went from a surf punk, weed-smoking phase to a hard left to a prep phase, where I wore a lot of polo shirts.” As for when she’ll put a cap on this acting thing, she says, simply, “When I’m meant to not do it, I’ll stop.”

Meanwhile, Stenberg isn’t through exploring her Danish heritage. Her grandmother is Greenlandic Inuit and her father recently visited Greenland for the first time to connect with his cousins. “That’s been the part of our heritage that we’ve been learning about and reconnecting with,” she says. “My plan is to visit Greenland soon.” Though Stenberg never met her grandmother – she passed away when she was a baby – her father has kept her memory alive, teaching his daughter about that side of her history. “I mostly know stories and have artefacts and things my grandmother made. She was a craftswoman,” Stenberg says. “I have her thick crocheted sweaters and her beadwork. I feel so lucky to have those things in my home.”