Renate Reinsve: The Night She Almost Quit Acting — Then Cannes Called
The most famous phone call in recent Norwegian cinema came one day after Renate Reinsve decided to quit acting for good. She had lain in bed, made the decision, told her friends she was done — and the next morning, director Joachim Trier called with a role he had written specifically for her. That role was Julie in The Worst Person in the World. Eighteen months later, Reinsve was standing at the Cannes Film Festival holding the Best Actress award, the first Norwegian actress ever to win it. This is the story of the breakthrough that almost never happened.
The long road to nowhere
Reinsve was born in 1987 in Solbergelva, a small town in southeastern Norway, and her path to acting was anything but smooth. Expelled from school at sixteen, she left Norway for Scotland, where she worked behind the bar of a hostel in Edinburgh. She eventually found her way back and into acting, and made her film debut in 2011 in Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st — with exactly one line: “Let’s go to the party.”
What followed was a decade of the kind of career that breaks actors quietly. She worked steadily in Norwegian theatre — since 2016 she has been contracted to Det Norske Teatret in Oslo — and picked up television roles and small film parts. But the lead roles, the parts she had entered the profession to play, never came. She watched from the wings while others got the calls. By her early thirties, the frustration had curdled into something final.
“I was laying in bed and I decided to quit acting,” she later told an interviewer, “just because I felt it was so frustrating never to get to do what I really wanted.” She had a backup plan, and it was as far from the film industry as imaginable: carpentry. She was serious enough that she told her friends. The decision felt like relief.
The call
Joachim Trier had not forgotten the girl with one line. “I wanted to do something with Renate for a long time after she had her one famous line in Oslo, August 31st,” he later said. “I thought I owed Renate some more depth. I saw her in the theatre. No one had given her a lead part in a feature film, so I did.”
The part was Julie, the heroine of The Worst Person in the World — a woman in her late twenties drifting through careers, relationships, and identities in contemporary Oslo, trying to figure out who she is before time runs out. Trier had written it with Reinsve in mind, building the character around the specific qualities he had seen in her on stage: the intelligence, the restlessness, the emotional transparency. For obvious reasons, as he put it, everyone can now see why.
The timing was almost absurdly perfect. Reinsve has described the surreal whiplash of it: one day she was done with acting, the next she was preparing the biggest role of her life. “Life has been pretty surreal from that moment,” she said. They shot the film, waited, and then the premiere at Cannes in July 2021 detonated.
Cannes: the vomiting and the ovation
The premiere of The Worst Person in the World at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival is now the stuff of legend. The film received a rapturous reception — one famous sequence, in which Julie runs through a frozen Oslo while time stops for everyone else, became an instant classic of romantic cinema. The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw gave the film five stars and declared that Reinsve “takes off like a rocket, deserving star status to rival Lily James or Alicia Vikander for her tremendously mature, sensitive and sympathetic performance.”
Reinsve’s own experience of the triumph was more complicated. The morning after the premiere, she read the reviews and promptly vomited — “a happy kind of hurl,” as one profile put it. During the screening she had 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. “My whole image of myself and what I could do just changed instantly,” she said. Then she won Best Actress — and had to process that too, smiling until, as she put it, “you feel your face go stiff from smiling so long.”
The awards piled up: the Cannes prize, a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress, and two Academy Award nominations for the film itself — Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay. At 33, after a decade of near-misses and a one-day retirement, Renate Reinsve was suddenly one of the most in-demand actresses in world cinema.
Why Julie worked
Part of what made the performance extraordinary was how much of Reinsve’s own story was in it. Julie is a woman who keeps quitting things — medicine, photography, relationships — because nothing feels like the right life. Reinsve had lived the professional version of that drift: the years of small parts, the feeling of being close to the thing she wanted without ever touching it. She has spoken about the strength she now sees in those lost years. “You feel so weak and lost throughout those years of not knowing and trying to figure stuff out,” she said. “Looking back, I feel it’s actually a strong place to be. There’s strength in being open and honest that you’re trying to figure out what to do.”
It is the kind of insight that only comes from having nearly walked away. The performance’s famous naturalism — the sense that Julie is thinking in real time, surprising herself — is the product of an actress who knew exactly what it felt like to not know what came next.
After the breakthrough
Reinsve has handled the post-Cannes years with notable care. Rather than cashing in on Hollywood blockbusters, she chose interesting directors and difficult parts: Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man opposite Sebastian Stan and Piero Messina’s Another End, both of which played at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival; Armand, which premiered at Cannes in 2024 and earned her a European Film Award nomination; and the Apple TV+ legal thriller Presumed Innocent opposite Jake Gyllenhaal. She is reuniting with Trier for Sentimental Value, closing the circle with the director who called the day after she quit.
The carpentry plan, presumably, is shelved. But the story’s real moral is not about luck — it is about the strange mathematics of creative careers. Reinsve spent ten years becoming the actress who could play Julie, in exactly the period when she believed those years were wasted. The night she decided to quit was the night she was ready. Cannes didn’t discover a newcomer. It finally noticed someone who had been there all along — one day after she almost left.
Before Julie: the decade that almost broke her
The Cannes fairytale only lands if you know what came before. Reinsve was expelled from school at sixteen and left Norway for Scotland, working behind the bar of an Edinburgh hostel. She found her way back into acting the hard way: steady theatre work, small film and television parts, and in 2011 exactly one line in Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st — “Let’s go to the party.”
What followed was a decade of the career that quietly breaks actors: always working, never breaking through. She became a respected stage performer — part of the Norwegian theatre ensemble world from 2016 — while the lead film roles went to other people. By her own account in later interviews, she was close to quitting the profession entirely when Trier called. The director had not forgotten the girl with one line. “No one had given her a lead part in a feature film,” he said, “so I did.” Julie — the drifting, quitting, searching heroine of The Worst Person in the World — was written, in part, for the actress who had lived the professional version of that drift.
The Reinsve filmography: essential roles
| Year | Film / Series | Role & note |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Oslo, August 31st | One line: “Let’s go to the party.” — the cameo Trier never forgot. |
| 2021 | The Worst Person in the World | Julie — Best Actress at Cannes 2021; the film earned two Oscar nominations. |
| 2024 | A Different Man | Starring opposite Sebastian Stan; premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. |
| 2024 | Armand | Lead role in the debut feature that won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes; earned Reinsve a European Film Award nomination. |
| 2024 | Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+) | Carolyn Polhemus, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in the legal thriller series. |
| 2025 | Sentimental Value | Reunion with Joachim Trier — reportedly a Grand Prix winner at Cannes 2025, closing the circle. |
FAQ: Renate Reinsve’s Cannes breakthrough
What did Renate Reinsve win at Cannes?
The Best Actress award at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival for The Worst Person in the World — one of the most celebrated acting prizes of recent years, won on the back of a premiere she has described as both vomiting-inducing and euphoric.
Was Renate Reinsve really about to quit acting?
By her own account, yes. After a decade of small parts and steady theatre work without a lead film role, she was close to leaving the profession when Joachim Trier offered her Julie — a part he said he had wanted to give her for years.
What is the “vomiting” story from Cannes?
Reinsve has described being so overwhelmed with nerves before the Cannes premiere that she was physically sick — then walking into a rapturous reception, a five-star Guardian review, and overnight stardom. The contrast is why the night became legend.
Did The Worst Person in the World win an Oscar?
It was nominated for two Academy Awards — Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film — but did not win. Reinsve herself was not individually Oscar-nominated.
What has Renate Reinsve done since Cannes?
She chose carefully rather than cashing in: A Different Man and Armand on the festival circuit, the Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent as Carolyn Polhemus, and a reunion with Trier for Sentimental Value.
Will she work with Joachim Trier again?
She already has — Sentimental Value reunites the director and his star, completing an arc that began with a single line in Oslo, August 31st fourteen years earlier.
Sources & Further Reading
Read next: Aksel Hennie: From Actor to Director in Norwegian Film | Anders Danielsen Lie: The Doctor Who Acts — A Double Life
