Renate Reinsve Was Buying Nails Before Cannes Called
A day before the role that won her Cannes Best Actress, Renate Reinsve was ready to quit acting for good. The story behind The Worst Person in the World.
From a frustrated “carpenter” carrying a hammer and nails to “Best Actress” in the world.. the story of the girl a single phone call saved from her great escape. Can you imagine, for a moment, that the girl with the enchanting smile who stood on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival holding the Palme d’Or as the world’s best actress, was, just 24 hours before landing the role that changed her life, standing in a hardware store buying wood and nails to start a whole new life as a “carpenter”?
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This is the true, astonishing story of Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve, who spent long years in the shadows, feeling like an intruder in the art world, wrestling with a crushing sense that she “wasn’t good enough,” to the point that she’d actually decided to quit acting entirely after a string of disappointments and marginal roles no one even noticed. Renate had reached thirty feeling lost, exactly like the character she’d later play, so she decided to escape the pressure of casting auditions and renovate an old house, working with her hands, far from the cameras.
The Phone Call That Changed Everything
But fate had a script in store for her stranger than fiction, because the day after her decision to quit, her phone rang, and the caller was the brilliant director Joachim Trier, the man Renate had met ten years earlier in a very small role — a role that was just “one line” in the film Oslo, August 31st. The astonishing twist is that Joachim never forgot that girl who delivered a single line — her face stayed etched in his memory for a full decade, and he decided to write his new film, The Worst Person in the World, specifically for her.
A Role Written for Her
Indeed, he didn’t write the role and then go looking for an actress — he tailored the character Julie to fit Renate exactly, and when he told her, she thought he was joking, or that she was dreaming, because she was suffering from “impostor syndrome” and believed she didn’t deserve the lead. But she agreed, and gave us one of the most honest and unguarded performances in modern film history.
The Worst Person in the World
What Renate did in this film was a complete “state of being” — she embodied the aimlessness of the millennial generation, the hesitation between jobs, the fear of commitment, the desire to stop time and run through the streets. Her famous running scene, with time frozen around her, wasn’t just a piece of cinema, it was an expression of her inner longing for freedom.
What the Discovery Story Leaves Out
The film itself is built like a novel, broken into numbered chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, each one framing a different stretch of Julie’s drifting between men, jobs, and versions of who she’s supposed to become. The frozen-time run happens inside one of those chapters, the morning after a party where she meets a man she barely knows while still technically committed to someone else, and the whole sequence plays less like wish fulfillment than like a held breath, the one moment the character gets to stop performing a decision and just feel the pull of wanting something. Reinsve plays it almost without expression, which is exactly what makes it land: nothing about her face is asking the audience to feel a particular way about what she’s doing, it simply lets the wanting be visible.
The hardware-store story is irresistible, but it undersells how long Reinsve had already been working before that phone rang. She’d spent years in Norwegian theater and smaller film and television roles, including the brief part in Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st that supposedly stayed with him for a decade, well before anyone was calling her the best actress in the world. That’s easy to skip past in the version of the story built for a red-carpet interview, where a single phone call reads as pure fate arriving out of nowhere. What actually happened is closer to a decade of unglamorous, mostly unnoticed craft finally meeting a part built to use all of it at once, which is a less magical but more useful story for anyone else still waiting for their own call.
Which makes the impostor syndrome in the story worth a second look rather than just a charming detail. Julie, the character, spends the whole film unable to trust that any of her choices are really hers, and it would be tidy, maybe too tidy, if Reinsve’s real doubt about deserving the role turned out to be the exact feeling that let her play it so precisely. The truer version is less romantic: she was ready long before she believed she was, and readiness that goes unrecognized by the person carrying it doesn’t stop being real, it just waits for someone else to notice it first.
