It’s hard to believe Renate Reinsve only “burst” onto the American film scene three award seasons ago with her electric performance in The Worst Person in the World. It was the kind of role actresses dream of — featuring a range of genres, emotions to play with, and a character arc to die for. She took full advantage of it, ultimately getting an Oscar nomination for the unconventional part.
Since then she’s been booked and busy. You may have seen Reinsve on the Apple TV+ show Presumed Innocent opposite Jake Gyllenhaal. It was a remake of the 1990 film starring Harrison Ford about an affair gone wrong. Reinsve played the mistress. She had two films at Sundance last year including Handling the Undead which reunited her with her Worst Person in the World costar Anders Danielsen Lie. The second was A Different Man starring Sebastian Stan as an actor with Neurofibromatosis who undergoes a procedure that changes his body completely. She played his neighbor who takes his story and makes it into a play, leading him back to his old life and to regret his transformation.
As her career has taken off, so has the variety and size of the roles she chooses. But Reinsve’s latest part in the Norwegian psychological drama Armand gives her a lot to chew on. She plays a recently widowed well-known actress sent to her child’s school after another student accuses him of something sinister. As she meets with the school administrators and the other parents, her own relationship to the truth and those around her starts to unravel. Is she a manipulative grieving mother and widow or just a woman trying her best in an unfair situation?
I had the opportunity to chat with Reinsve about playing such an emotionally demanding role and how close the cast of A Different Man has been during this awards season.
Armand is open in theaters now.
