Renate Reinsve on why she almost quit acting: “I made that decision to do something else”
After seeing Julie run through the streets of Oslo, Norway, at sunset and crash a house party in the most stylish way possible, audiences all over the world fell completely head-over-heels in love with Renate Reinsve.
Despite seemingly appearing from nowhere, the Norwegian actor had been quietly working her way up the industry for many years, building a relationship with Joachim Trier after taking a one-line extra role in Oslo, August 31st and maintaining a friendship with him until her star-making turn came with the third instalment in his Oslo trilogy, The Worst Person in the World.
But during the years in between, Reinsve struggled (like many of us) to find the path that was meant for her, going on a wayward journey that took her through all the ups and downs of being in your 20s and trying to find her place along the way. It’s a rite of passage experience that became the focus of Trier’s award-winning film, with the director creating an adult coming-of-age story that honed in on the emotional puberty we go through in our threshold years.
We’re expected to have everything figured out, with movies about people this age showing 25-year-olds already in their dream jobs with a fixed mortgage and a sausage dog. But Reinsve’s journey towards this stage of her career has been as tumultuous and life-affirming as Julie’s, with the actor describing her affinity with the character and the bumps in the road that led her to the role.
No journey is a linear route, with the actor sharing how she had tried countless jobs before finally landing her dream role. Many of us struggle to find our niche and go through periods in which we question whether it would be better to abandon our dreams entirely, with Reinsve saying, “After acting school, I did some really great theatre. But somehow I ended up in film and TV doing a lot of roles that were mostly one-dimensional functions of the plot. So I had actually decided to quit. I had this big moment where I made that decision to do something else. And the very next day, Joachim called me. It was the weirdest coincidence.”
It could’ve been the end of the road for her, but something tells me that she wouldn’t give up as easily as she described. However, it is incredibly disheartening to be met with so many vapid roles that don’t reflect the complexity of real-life women, something that became a huge deterrence for the actor during the beginning of her career.
Julie ended up being a roundabout emblem of the many struggles Reinsve herself had gone through during her 20s, with the actor reflecting on the lessons she learnt from her by saying, “She’s in a big, divisive, existential vacuum. I was afraid that she would seem passive, because she is there seeing what the situation is, and having trouble making choices.”
Reinsve, having understood the impact foundational beliefs while figuring out one’s place can have in propelling one’s life, poured it into her understanding of the character, noting, “But I wanted that to be like a wise, strong place to be, because it’s the start of any progressive movement in one’s own life. She’s actually exploring what it is to be in that social structure. I don’t think she’s doing it consciously. But she is trying to really find out what it’s all about before making any big choices.”
