THEfor life Renate Reinsve38 years old, at the cinema now with horror Backrooms, it could be the plot of a movie. A true sliding door that completely changed the course of its history. The actress, Palme d’Or at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival thanks to the movie Fjord and a 2026 Oscar nomination for his performance in Sentimental Value, one evening five years ago he decided to abandon acting and take up carpentry. “It was my plan B,” he told Seth Meyers“which isn’t quite the same as acting.” Exactly the next day, however, the director Joachim Trier calls her for a leading role in the film The worst person in the world. She accepts, and everything changes from there.
Renate Reinsve, who is the actress of Backroomsfilms, private life
When in 2021 The worst person in the world was presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, outside of Norway, his country of origin, almost no one knew his name. Joachim Trier, who had already directed it ten years earlier in Oslo, 31 August (and assigning her only one line), he entrusted her with the role of Julie: a restless, brilliant, indecisive woman, incapable of adhering to the sentimental and professional models of her generation. Later, the director admitted that he had written that character specifically about her.
A character who, thanks to his interpretation, was transformed into an authentic, fragile and magnetic contemporary portrait, in which thirty-year-olds from every corner of the globe could recognize themselves. She first of all: «I didn’t know who I wanted to be either», he admitted. «I was looking for my own style, I constantly messed up with men, I couldn’t find peace».
Queen of Cannes and an Oscar nomination
The consecration was immediate. At Cannes he won the award for best actress and, from that moment, international cinema began to look at her as one of the most interesting figures of her generation. And the most surprising thing is that all this happened when she herself was close to giving up acting.
After the success The worst person in the worldhas alternated author projects and international productions. Choosing roles that are often ambiguous, restless, difficult to classify. Films like psychological dark comedy A Different Man, Armandfor example. And above all Sentimental Value – once again directed by Trier, of whom she became his muse – consolidated her reputation.
In ValueSpecial Jury Grand Prix at Cannes e 2026 Oscar winner as best international film for NorwayRenate plays probably the most complex and layered character of her career. «I wanted to challenge myself with a emotionally heavier, more mature role», he declared. For her performance she was also nominated for the 2026 Oscar as best leading actress, but the award was later awarded to Jessie Buckley.
Nora Borg is the daughter of Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård, winner of the Golden Globe for best supporting actor), a former director who suddenly returns to the lives of his two daughters after abandoning the family when they were children. He wants to make a new autobiographical film and proposes to Nora to play his motherwho committed suicide several years earlier.
She, who is still angry with him, refuses, and it is precisely from this fracture – artistic, familial and psychological – that the whole film develops. Compared to Julie – the character who made her famous at Cannes in 2021 -, a woman always on the move, full of vitality and desire for possibilities, Nora, on the other hand, is blocked, introverted, consumed by anger and her own interiority. And it is precisely this emotional capacity that makes Reinsve’s interpretation so sophisticated and credible.
Renate Reinsve in “Sentimental Value”. (Lucky Red)
Backroomshorror is Renate’s latest film at the cinema
With Backroomsrecently released in cinemas, Renate Reinsve enters the territory of psychological horror for the first time, choosing a project very distant from the intimate European cinema that made her famousAnd. In the film directed by Kane Parsons, the actress plays the coach Maryan enigmatic and rational figure immersed in an environment dominated by restlessness and disorientation (if not exactly paranoia).
Filmed entirely in a closed environment that recreates a rather furniture emporium cheap and on the verge of failure, Reinsve via a portal accesses a parallel dimension which develops as a labyrinthine extension of the same store. The actress, in her first attempt with this genre, has defined it in several interviews Backrooms «a reflection on contemporary need for escape and on the fascination of the absurd in a world that is increasingly difficult to interpret.”
Renate Reinsve in a scene from “Backrooms”. (The Wonder Pictures)
Renate Reinsve’s private life and boyfriend
Very reserved about her private life, in recent years Renate Reinsve has however also allowed us to glimpse something of her personal world. She has a son, born in 2019 from a relationship with the director Julián Nazario Vargashis former partner. She described motherhood as a central experience but one to be protected away from public exposure, so much so he never even disclosed the child’s name.
Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel and Renate Reinsve at the Oscars. (Getty Images)
All we know about the little one is that «a quarter of it is also Italianbecause the father’s family is originally from Naples, and they help me a lot when I’m working. And between one film and another I have a lot of time on my hands, I can make up for what I’ve lost. Like every mother I believe, sometimes I feel guilty. However, I am convinced that it is a positive thing grow up with parents who have goals that make them happy».
Also his relationship with his current partner, the Norwegian director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel – nephew of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman – has always remained far from media spectacularization. Halfdan and Renate worked together in the roles of director and protagonist respectively in Armanda film that won the Camera d’Or as best first film at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Renate can be defined as a new King Midas: everything she touches turns to gold.