'I thought about carpentry as an alternative to acting'

Bangla Press Desk:   Renate Rainsvæ is a Norwegian actress who rose to international fame for her role in Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World. She won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a BAFTA for her performance. She has also worked in theatre for a long time and recently gained international acclaim for her role in Sentimental Value, which put her in the Oscar race.

Renate Rainsvæ, who previously won critical acclaim at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, said in an interview with Late Night with Seth Meyers that the day before she was offered the role of Julie in The Worst Person in the World, she was considering quitting acting and taking up carpentry as an alternative.

Renate Rainsvæ has received numerous accolades for her acting. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian praised the film, saying, “Renette Rainsov is the actress who plays the role and she plays it like a rocket, a rival to Lily James or Alicia Vikander, and deserves star status for her extraordinarily mature, sensitive and sympathetic performance.

Renette Rainsov was nominated for the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Leading Actress. The Norwegian actress is currently receiving praise for her performance in the film ‘Sentimental Value’.

Renette Rainsov grew up in a remote area of ​​Norway. A few houses and a road in the forest. She always felt like a misfit. She was obsessed with her friends’ Backstreet Boys, and secretly listened to Pink Floyd. In real life, she was repeatedly rejected. She made so many mistakes that she was asked to leave the scouts; she could not do the family construction business. Because she could not follow the rules. At the age of 16, he lived alone. At the age of 14, someone came and told him to apply to theater school. Thinking of acting as a career, he dreamed of a new life for himself.

Then Renate ran away from everything. At the age of 17, he arrived in Edinburgh. He liked the double shift work in hostels, restaurants, and bars; the proximity of people from different cultures, the parties—everything. However, it was difficult to understand British humor.

After returning to Norway, he studied theater and worked on stage for a decade. Although Norwegian theater is of high quality, he felt like he was at the end of the road. Movie offers were not coming his way. So he also thought about becoming a carpenter, because he liked renovating a dilapidated house.

After the isolation of his childhood, he is now the center of discussion. What is this feeling? —Renate Rainsov said in response to the question, I don't know. Within a day or two of deciding to quit acting, Trier called him for the role of Julie. That's how his life changed.

One day in July 2021. Renate woke up in the morning and read ‘The Guardian’ and immediately vomited. The Norwegian actress was in Cannes at the time; the previous night, ‘The Worst Person in the World’ had premiered there.

The film, directed by Yekim Trier, depicts the eccentric yet uncompromising journey of a young woman, Julie. It was Renate’s first film in a leading role. During the screening, she thought – this film is great; but I am terrible. A few hours later, the Guardian wrote about her in a film review – Renate is probably one of the best actresses of her generation.

She said, it felt so excessive that she could not accept it, so she started to vomit. But I was also happy. All my ideas about myself changed in an instant. I was very overwhelmed.

Renate said, then I thought, okay, I need to keep a little distance from this. Just as criticism cannot be taken excessively, neither can praise. Surely such recognition feels like an addiction? She said, “Everything in life is temporary. So the goal was to keep everything a little bit equal, to keep the image of myself that I have in my mind intact.”

After the success of ‘The Worst Person in the World’, it was expected that she would soon get a call in the United States. And so it happened. Renate Rainsvey stays away from the conventional form of stardom as much as possible. She starred opposite Sebastian Stan in ‘A Different Man.’

In May of this year, she returned to the spotlight with ‘Sentimental Value.’ An ambitious film about the tension between family, art, and love. Here, she plays Nora, a depressed actress whose estranged filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård) suddenly returns to life and presents a semi-autobiographical screenplay written for her. When Nora, angry, rejects the offer, her father casts rising American star Rachel (Elle Fanning) in the role, and continues to make Nora and her sister Agnes uncomfortable with her strange presence.

During the shooting of this film, Renate Rainsov convinced herself that this film would never be a match for 'The Worst Person in the World'. In an interview given at the Cannes Film Festival, he said, 'To be honest, 'Sentimental Value' is not that immediately captivating. But it is a beautiful, devastating, thematically rich, powerful work of generational change.

Later, the film won the Grand Prix, and now the film is in the Oscar race. It also received a Golden Globe nomination. At Cannes, the film received a 19-minute standing ovation - the third longest in the history of the festival.

Julie in ‘The Worst Person in the World’ and Nora in ‘Sentimental Value’—both characters were written by the director with Renate Trier in mind. So are the characters actually a reflection of her? Do they have some similarities to Julie?

BP/TD