Renate Reinsve on vomit-inducing reviews and 19-minute standing ovations: ‘You feel your face go stiff from smiling so long’

One day in July 2021, Renate Reinsve got up, read the Guardian and promptly vomited. It was – mostly – a happy kind of hurl. The Norwegian actor was at Cannes, where The Worst Person in the World had premiered the previous evening. Joachim Trier’s film, which follows Julie, a young woman on a capricious yet uncompromising quest for meaning and happiness, was the first Reinsve had ever starred in. During the screening, she decided “this movie is great, but I am shit!” Hours later she was confronting the possibility that she might be one of the greatest actors of her generation. This newspaper’s verdict – “A star is born” – was, she said, “too much to process, so I just started puking. My whole image of myself and what I could do just changed instantly.”

Reinsve went on to win the best actress prize at the festival. Her performance would later be shortlisted for a Bafta and a slew of other awards (the film itself received two Oscar nominations). The accolades certainly helped on the self-esteem front, but the 38-year-old knew she mustn’t let the acclaim go to her head. “I was very overwhelmed and then I sat with it and was like: OK, I need to keep a distance to this somehow,” she recalls, sitting on the sofa in a cavernous hotel suite in Soho, London. “You can’t take criticism too personally and you can’t take praise too personally.” Such affirmation, I imagine, must become addictive. “Yes. And everything in life shall pass. So the aim was to keep everything a little bit even and keep the image I have of myself intact.”

Serene, meticulously self-effacing and aspirationally Scandi-chic in brown denim and black loafers, Reinsve is about as far from the archetypal fame monster as you could possibly imagine.