Sentimental Value, written and directed by Joachim Trier, is a gorgeous, insightful Scandinavian family drama about two adult sisters who reunite with their absent father after their mother dies, and about how difficult it is for any of us to say what we mean.
But in this particular family, the father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), is a renowned film director who hasn’t had a hit in a while, and one of his daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve), is an actor. Gustav wants Nora to star in his would-be comeback film about the suicide of his own mother. When she refuses, he hires a more biddable American star, Rachel (Elle Fanning). So when I sat down with Reinsve and Fanning during September’s Toronto International Film Festival, we couldn’t resist peeling apart the layers required for actors to play actors.
“Ooh, there are a lot of pitfalls you can fall into, especially when you’re supposed to be a Hollywood American star,” Fanning says. “How do you play famous? You have to hold yourself a certain way.” (For instance, as Rachel does, you must not notice the minions who set up umbrellas on the beach in Cannes to shield you from the sand, and you must accept it as your due that a director will bribe a horse-carriage driver with Champagne to take you for a ride.)
“But Rachel is also more complex than her façade,” Fanning continues. “When she taps into an emotion, I think it surprises her that she has it.” In one particularly layered scene, in which Rachel cries while reading for Gustav, Fanning is able to convey that Rachel is thrilled to find herself weeping – “I’m crying in front of this famous director, how great of me!” – and also that weeping is the wrong thing for the character to do in that moment. “But later, when Gustav and Rachel part, we see the real her,” Fanning says. “I loved playing all that.”
Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Sentimental Value. Reinsve says working with director Joachim Trier is a life-changing experience.Kasper Tuxen/Elevation Pictures/Supplied
Nora is a much different actor than Rachel – more serious, Scandinavian-theatre famous. We meet her during a bravura sequence where she will do anything rather than step on stage to begin a play: She runs away, she rips her costume; there’s a wild stab at seduction, and a slap. “It’s a clear picture of the dynamic that’s happening inside her,” Reinsve says. “To open up as an actor, to find some authenticity, you have to go into some things in yourself. Nora is so terrified about going there, she panics.”
Reinsve’s own relationship to acting is less fraught: “It’s very much based on trying to figure out and process things in my own life. It’s been my lifesaver in so many situations.”
Born in Norway in 1987, Reinsve made her film debut in Trier’s Oslo, August 31 (2011); Sentimental Value is their third collaboration. She worked in theatre and television, but it was her second film with Trier, The Worst Person in the World (2021) – he wrote it for her – that caught the world’s attention. It was nominated for two Oscars; she was nominated for a BAFTA and named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival. By 2024, she was starring opposite Sebastian Stan in the film A Different Man, and Jake Gyllenhaal in the AppleTV+ series Presumed Innocent.
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“Worst Person was transformative on many levels for me,” Reinsve says. “In my career it changed everything. But also honestly looking at myself, and having that resonate with other people. I had to make myself feel things I hadn’t talked about or understood.” She remains “shocked” by how many people saw themselves in her character, Julie, as she bashes through her late 20s in Oslo, changing careers, abandoning relationships, crashing weddings and scarfing magic mushrooms.
“What’s the opposite of loneliness?” Reinsve asks. “That’s what I felt” after the film hit. “So many people said to me, ‘How did you play my life?’ It would be a 40-year-old woman, and then a 20-year-old guy, saying, ‘This is me.’”
Fanning’s rise as an actor was different. Born in Georgia in 1998, she’s been working since age two, at first playing younger versions of her actor sister Dakota’s characters. Since then she’s had “a lot of transformative roles” in films by the likes of David Fincher, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Sally Potter and Cameron Crowe. In 2010, “being on Sofia Coppola’s set for Somewhere was really inspiring,” she says. “I got to see this woman in charge, and she really took care of me.” Super 8 (2011) “was the first time people started seeing me not as Dakota Fanning. And Neon Demon was so polarizing and wild. I was 17, first time in Cannes and the first time I felt, ‘I can surprise people.’ I had some power. That was cool.”
Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning as Gustav and Rachel in Sentimental Value.Kasper Tuxen/Elevation Pictures/Supplied
Actors often talk about how little power they feel, despite their glamourous veneer: They have to vie for work, fulfill their directors’ visions, surrender their performances to the editing room. Their greatest power lies in what, in a specific instant, they are able to convey about human nature. So it’s fascinating in this film to watch people who communicate for a living have zero idea how to communicate with each other.
“Nora and Gustav don’t know how to talk,” Reinsve says. “She’s stuck in something that is too close to her. You have to find a distance to be able to process things. We all know what should happen in their scenes, how their relationship could be healthy, but they can’t do it. I love how much she knows about herself, and still how much she chooses not to get into. Even though, like Gustav, she went into her profession to try to understand things.”
Both actors describe Trier as the ideal actors’ director, able not only to navigate the required layers, but to unearth new ones. “It’s not like Joachim takes anything directly personal of us, but he finds a way to open us up to the authenticity in us,” Reinsve says. “We have rehearsals early, then certain moments linger and develop and –"
“- start bubbling away,” Fanning fills in.
“Then we feel so safe that we can lose ourselves, and moments just occur,” Reinsve goes on. “He writes flawed characters, but with no judgement. So you can explore the worst things about yourself, the things you don’t like, and it’s like –"
“Therapy?” Fanning chimes in. They erupt in laughter.
“It’s a life-changing experience, working with Joachim,” Reinsve sums up. “You feel a bit changed reading his scripts, and working on his movies, and even just seeing his movies. I took my whole family to Cannes to see this movie. We haven’t talked about it, but something has changed. I don’t know if we’ll be able to talk more easily now. But something without words has shifted.” If that’s not the ambition of acting, I don’t know what is.
Sentimental Value opens in select theatres Nov. 14.
Special to The Globe and Mail