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EXCLUSIVE: After she picked up the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her global breakout turn in 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, Renate Reinsve returned to the Croisette last May with Armand. From first-time feature director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, the psychological drama won the Camera d’Or trophy on the Riviera, and is now Norway’s entry for the International Oscar race. We’ve got a first-look at the teaser trailer for the movie which will begin its qualifying run in New York on November 29 via IFC Films before a limited release on February 7 that will expand wide a week later. Check it out above.
Deadline recently spoke with the busy Reinsve about Armand — she’s fresh off wrapping Sentimental Value, another collaboration with The Worst Person filmmaker Joachim Trier, and has A24’s The Governess ahead, among other projects. This week, she was nominated for a Best Actress European Film Award for Armand.
In Armand, Reinsve plays Elisabeth, an actress who has been summoned by the headmaster at her six-year-old son’s school. There has been an incident involving the eponymous boy and his best friend Jon, the latter having been found crying in the changing room by the caretaker. Jon has confided in his mother that Armand pinned him down, groped him, and — the allegation that Elisabeth finds the hardest to take in — threatened to anally rape him.
The parents of both boys are called in for the meeting, but the school management doesn’t know what actually happened. Was it just a children’s game or something much more serious? The incident triggers a series of events, forcing parents and school staff into a battle where madness, desire and obsession arise.
In his review, Deadline’s Damon Wise wrote that “Reinsve shines as a striking anti-heroine, playing a brittle, broken woman with a marshmallow interior.”
One of the most talked about scenes is the one in the teaser above, where Reinsve’s Elisabeth has a fit of laughter.
Reinsve told Deadline that Armand is “actually like the original project for me in movies,” explaining that she had earlier worked predominantly in theater, and eventually did a short movie with Tøndel. “We had two days of shooting, and we started crying in the end because we had a really strong connection artistically. And we said, ‘Okay, we have to do something again.’”
Tøndel, who is the grandson of Norwegian actress Liv Ullman and Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, began writing Armand nearly a decade ago, Reinsve said. But “to get your first film financed in Norway is really, really hard. So we, in the meantime, became best friends, and he kept on writing versions of the script and versions of the character, because he had an idea of this character, but he didn’t know the world she was going to be in. And he kept on developing her and the world around her.”
Ultimately, it came together and the team shot Armand in 21 days. “It’s a very special movie to me,” says Reinsve. “I remember Halfdan had written a new version, he was like, ‘Okay, it’s even darker this time’, the character got more and more challenging, and the ideas that he had for seeds for me got more and more impossible — like the laughing and crying scene was, of course, an impossible task for an actor to do.”
Speaking of the scene in the clip above, Reinsve says, “I came in in the morning. We hadn’t really talked about it since I read it in the script. It’s two sentences and I said…’This is an impossible scene, I’m not going to do that. We won’t get that that way you want’.” However, she adds, “We did it, and we pushed it and we pushed it. It’s like just when you have it, when you feel this is a take where I don’t know, where I was or it’s over. And we meet after, and then we just know it’s you can’t really put all of that stuff into words. You just kind of know together… We would always be very in tune and then you just know together, and you can kind of feel it in the whole room that you if you got it, it comes through, that other people feel something. Then you know, you have it.”
That scene, again, above – how many takes did it take? “It took all the whole we had, the whole day for that scene, because it’s kind of the turning point of the movie, and you need that scene. So he had put the whole day for that scene. But they had given me five days off after and I spent those five days resting. Acting is a very physical, and this was quite mentally challenging.”
Reinsve may be taking a bit of a rest, but is also off to LA in support of Armand and has “fingers crossed.”
