Sentimental Value's Renate Reinsve on Oslo, Nordic light, and creative chemistry with Joachim Trier

Nearly four years after the release of The Worst Person in the World – the fizzy, poignant romantic comedy that earned Danish-Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier two Oscar nominations, for best international feature and best original screenplay, in 2022 – Trier and his effervescent star, Renate Reinsve, are back with another heartbreaker.

Sentimental Value, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this past summer, stars Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as two sisters, Nora and Agnes, whose estranged director father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), has reappeared at their big, old childhood home in Oslo to make peace – and, with any hope, to make a movie with Nora, an actress. Also in the mix is Elle Fanning as Rachel Kemp, a young American starlet who, after Nora summarily turns Gustav down, must do what she can to make sense of the deeply personal story he’s trying to tell.

Related: “We have a really special chemistry”: Renate Reinsve and Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel are Scandinavia's hottest new film duo

It’s a film that covers a lot of ground – and so too does Reinsve’s conversation with Chloe Malle and Vogue senior editor Marley Marius on this Tuesday’s episode of The Run-Through. Read excerpts from their chat below… and then tune in to the full episode to hear Reinsve talk about her relationships with Fanning, Isabelle Huppert, and Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière; her attempt to build a veranda by hand; her off-duty wardrobe; and her forthcoming horror movie for A24 that she’s too scared to see herself. Prepare to be totally charmed.

Chloe Malle: Thank you so much for coming in. It is Friday afternoon at Vogue and Marley and I are in our Friday afternoon sweaters and sneakers, and we are not stepping up to Glinda in her corner office. You look fabulous. What else are you doing today? What’s on the weekend press tour?

Renate Reinsve: So today I actually have a little break after this. And that’s not often these days.

CM: What are you doing in your break? It’s a gorgeous day.

RR: I really wanted to go see some art, if you have any–

CM: Oh, have you gone to the new Frick? It just reopened a few months ago. Newly designed. It’s so beautiful.

RR: So we made the plan for that part of my day. Then I’m going to have a couple of screenings. Well, I’m not in the screenings, but I’ll do the Q&As after.

CM: What do you usually do when you have to go to the before and after of a screening? Is there a cast dinner, or are you just sort of scrolling on your phone?

RR: No, it’s a dinner, and then maybe we invite some friends or someone we’re distributing with – or they’re distributing our movie in that country we’re in.

CM: It’s sort of like Rachel Kemp when she invites Gustav in Deauville.

RR: It’s so meta. This whole experience is so meta. It feels like we’re still in the movie. And also the sister dynamic – me and Inga could never really get out of it.

Marley Marius: You have such good chemistry. It’s so sweet.

CM: Did you meet on this movie?

RR: We had done a children’s play when we were younger, and it was so silly but really funny.

CM: At what age?

RR: It was in our early 20s. But it felt like we had something from before – something very silly – so it felt like something we would have as children, so we could build off of that.

CM: Did Joachim know that?

RR: I don’t think he did.

CM: How was your L.A. trip? You just got here from L.A., right?

RR: It was extremely busy, because we all have families outside, so we’re trying to make all the stuff we’re doing in the shortest amount of time possible so we can go back to our normal life.

CM: Do you have kids?

RR: Yeah, I have a son.

CM: Okay. How old is he?

RR: Six.

CM: My son too. He’s extremely naughty. I was just telling Marley, I have had a parent–teacher conference every week for the last month. This morning I was like, “Arthur, do you know why we’re meeting with Betty again?” He’s like, “Because I don’t listen.”

RR: I think it’s a good sign if you have a little rascal.

MM: How old was the young actor in the movie, who plays Agnes’s son?

RR: He’s eight.

MM: He was so sweet.

RR: So sweet. And he was so present, and he was just really landing in the scene. He wasn’t aware of the camera at all – he was just there. And then he was also all over when we were not filming. He was crazy, like, “I’m tired. I want all the chocolate.” And he was running around.

CM: Did you film everything in Oslo?

RR: I did, but Stellan and Elle – they went to Deauville.

MM: Those scenes are so beautiful.

RR: So beautiful. But it wasn’t as beautiful as it looks, because it was really freezing and so much wind and everything was blowing around. When they came home, they looked discouraged, but they got back eventually. They were lagging from that trip – I think it was a hard part of the movie. And we did some scenes in Sweden, especially with Stellan, when he’s in his home. He has this great scene where he calls Nora, his daughter, drunk. He does that so great.

CM: Was he actually drunk?

RR: No. And that’s the amazing thing. That you would ask that is a great compliment.

CM: Does your son visit you on set? Or how do you sort of organise that when you’re shooting?

RR: Well, that’s been the best thing about this, because I’ve kind of been so lucky that every production I’ve done, he’s been able to come there. Because I share him with my ex 50–50, they come to the city I’m in if I’m shooting somewhere, and we get that same 50–50. And then I try to be, of course, home as much as possible so that he can go to his school and do his thing with his friends. This was supposed to be my year off, and then all of this great stuff happened, and it’s very hard to say no to.

CM: Does he understand your job? Because it’s both hard and the simplest job for kids to understand.

RR: I was going to ask you questions because you come from that… how are you doing?

CM: This film was very specific for me. When I was little, I spent a lot of time on the set of Murphy Brown, and I just thought that that was sort of what most people did. But in the same way that everyone thinks their childhood is normal. I mean, my mom and my father lived in separate countries but were together, and I just assumed that’s what everyone’s parents did. But it is a very confusing and also relatable thing for a child to see someone whose job is to pretend, because so much of their world is pretend.

RR: Right. We do it since we’re kids, the acting. I just never stopped doing it. You try to understand the situation or a social structure you’re in through playing it out. And that’s also how I got into it when I was nine – really enjoying that. But my son has been, I think, discovering that this is a bit unusual, and there’ve been so many posters. Oslo is really small, so you really see the posters everywhere. They were having screenings of this movie, Sentimental Value, and Worst Person, and that was weird. And he was starting to get a bit anxious. And then, I don’t know if it was a good idea, but I took him to the Norwegian premiere, and I didn’t talk to anyone else but him, so he would know that he was the most important. And then he kind of actually stopped being anxious. Maybe I fucked him up even more, or maybe it was okay. It’s hard to know what to do.

MM: Because he’s probably like, why is mum everywhere? And all this attention on mum … what does that mean for me?

CM: That’s smart. My mom never took me to anything event-wise, but it made me feel excluded. Which, in retrospect, I think I understand why she did that, and that was fine – she just didn’t want there to be photos of me or whatever. But at the time, it was like, oh, but everyone’s talking about this thing, and I’m not a part of it.

RR: And everyone comes up on the street being like, “Congratulations!” when we just got the Oscar entry from Norway, and he would just scream when one more person and one more person and one more person… And of course it’s nice for me to hear, but also finding the balance between giving them attention and not being rude and saying, “I’m with this little boy – thank you so much…” So it’s something to always be aware of and try to protect him in all of this.

MM: I was going to ask about the experience of shooting in Oslo. Joachim has made what’s now known as the Oslo trilogy –Reprise; Oslo, August 31st; and The Worst Person in the World – and this is also set, for the most part, in Oslo. What do you think makes the city come alive on screen the way it does?

RR: I think it’s the light. It’s a lot about the light. It’s very special. In the summer, you don’t get a sunset – the sun is just up all the time. And you have all these special times where the lighting is really beautiful. And I think because the winter is so long, and it’s dark eight months of the year, when the sun comes back, it’s like a festival. It’s amazing. Everything just happens in the streets, and you can go out not knowing what to do and you’ll meet someone, and then you’ll just end up partying the whole night.

CM: I also loved the sort of gingerbread Victorian house that is so the nucleus of the film. It’s a multi-generational family home, and there’s obviously, as people will see in the film, a lot of plot points that take place in the house. Do you have a house that felt like that for you growing up?

RR: Well, my family moved around a lot, and it would always change up because my mom and dad split up, and then they would have new relationships, and they would split up. So it was always a lot of people moving around. I didn’t go to, you say, preschool or kindergarten, but there was this woman taking care of a few kids, and she kind of always stayed the same, and the same kids were there. I had my best friend there, and he was my best friend until I was in my mid-twenties, and we still keep in contact, but we have such different lives now. But that was kind of my base, and that’s where I actually have the most memories – from that house.

CM: The house that you filmed in was actually in Joachim’s neighbourhood that he just discovered on a walk?

RR: Yeah.

CM: Did someone actually live there? Were you there for a long time in this person’s home?

RR: It was a family home, and we were shown pictures from all times. So we kind of had that feeling of what this had meant and how much time had passed in that house… And the family was very generous to give us the house for a few months. And Joachim has said also that they built a studio version to do some of the scenes, and they took the family to see how the house looked exactly the same as it was in the ’60s. And that was very emotional for them.

CM: That’s interesting.

RR: It was so integrated in our lives, both what happened there and what had happened in our lives. It’s a very personal movie for all of us involved.

CM: In the film, Stellan Skarsgård’s character, who is a great director who hasn’t made a film in two decades, writes a film with his daughter Nora, who you play, in mind, and she does not want to play that role. He wrote this role, as well as The Worst Person in the World, with you in mind. Are you part of that idea generation? Do you give input into any of the lines?

RR: I think because Joachim and Eskil [Vogt, Trier’s co-screenwriter and longtime collaborator] go into the writing room, and that’s kind of their little room where no one else is let in – although we would love to – and they watch movies and they talk about all these themes and it builds in there… On The Worst Person in the World, he had seen me in some things, and we knew each other a little bit, and I had this one line, but he knew that I had some levity that he was looking for in a character, and also had seen me do a lot of heavy, dramatic things on stage. So he wanted that combination in a character and then he wrote it picturing me, so that would inform that character.

And then when we got to rehearsals, he would adapt the script and the scenes to what comes out of that dynamic between the actors in rehearsal and the person portraying that character. And in this, Sentimental Value, he did that, but it was even deeper because now we kind of know each other so well. We know that we can express something through each other. He knows where I can go and want to go with a character. So he wanted to write a more mature role with more emotional depth and weight. We knew where we were going with it, and then also we get to rehearsal and he adapts the scripts from those rehearsals. And then on set, it’s also very flexible, very open. We know the ideal version of a scene, and we go in with that, but it’s very open so that whatever comes out that’s authentic will stay in the movie.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.