Renate Reinsve is like you’ve never seen her before in the vicious schoolyard psychodrama “Armand.” The Norwegian actress teams up with writer/director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel (the grandson of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman) to play an emotionally traumatized and career-busted actress summoned to the academy of her young son (of the title) to suss out a classroom skirmish involving Armand and another boy. An atmosphere of hysteria and panic floods in when her prior relationship to that other boy’s parents starts to sway emotions and allegiances and reveal past betrayals. It’s a role even more ambitious and demanding than the one that made her an international star in “The Worst Person in the World” as a millennial romantic in creative and personal freefall.
And she’s falling to pieces again here, too. The hothouse, single-location movie premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where “Worst Person in the World” breakout Reinsve finally saw the film for the first time. “I kind of wished that I had seen it before, because it was so overwhelming to see it, both because it is the hardest role I’ve ever done, and you get sucked right back into the workspace of it,” Reinsve told IndieWire. “What you went through. Because you can’t ever really see a movie that you’ve been in, or I can’t. Now I’ve seen it two times, and I will see it a third time just to actually try to see it. It’s very surprising. It takes you on paths, the inner life of the characters, you don’t know where they’re going to take you.”
“Armand” is now repping Norway, where the film shot on location in an actual school, in the race for the 2025 Best International Feature Oscar. The film’s stifling atmosphere and intensely dramatic and borderline avant-garde flourishes — involving both improvised and choreographed dance-as-symbolism, and Reinsve at one point has a full-on laughing-fit breakdown that lasts nearly 10 minutes — may prove a challenge for some. But there’s no denying the force of Reinsve’s performance as Elisabeth, an overprotective mother with a dark past involving the death of her partner — and one that comes into play when it’s alleged Armand abused one of his schoolmates, whose mother is Elisabeth’s dead husband’s sister.
Reinsve literally took two months of bed rest after finishing production in 2022 — since then, she’s been seen in “A Different Man” as a dilettante playwright obsessed with Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson, and was still filming “Worst Person” director Joachim Trier’s followup “Sentimental Value” when we spoke.
Talk of her much-needed bed rest before the Cannes premiere was no exaggeration, as Reinsve explained, almost like in Victorian times when a quote-unquote hysterical woman was ordered to take to bed.
“It took so much for me. It’s like if an athlete needs to push himself really far, he needs a lot of rest. For this character, that’s why I had to lay down. We tried to push each other’s limits, so I had to rest for a couple of months, both mentally and physically,” she said. “It’s also a great gift to be able to be pushed so far by a director. Me and Halfdan had a lot of fun pushing each other really far. For the next movie, we now know there are some limits.”
So about the film’s most talked-about scene: a snot- and drool-filled freakout as Elisabeth totally breaks down in hysterics and disbelief as her son’s administrators grill her about the bureaucratic steps toward punishing Armand for a transgression that maybe didn’t happen. As I wrote in my Cannes review, “At one point, Elisabeth utterly loses her shit in a too-long, nervous fit of uncontrollable, nonstop laughter that is probably the magnum opus of Reinsve’s career. Like church giggles for the mad and delirious, Elisabeth explodes in a moment that’s the Scandinavian version of ‘crying, screaming, throwing up,’ howling, shaking, getting red-faced, drooling, eventually bursting into tears at the most absolutely inappropriate moment.”
So how much of that was Reinsve really losing her shit on the day, or Reinsve as Elisabeth, or both?
“It is Elisabeth, but to be able to do that, I have to find all the little details that resonate in me to go to that place where all of that just happens. It’s a very thin line, and this is what I am talking about when I say pushing the limits because this is something I’ve never done before,” Reinsve said. “I told Halfdan, ‘This is a scene that’s impossible to do. I won’t be able to do it.’ He [blocked] the whole day off [for the scene]. Everything before that in the analysis of the character I have to build so it’s possible to go to that place. They gave me five days after that scene to rest because they knew it was going to take a toll.”
She continued, “This is a big conversation of where does the craft cross who you are and your own experience of life and how you perceive things. Of course, I have to find something in myself that is similar or that I can relate to in that situation. Every human being has that in them. It’s just a matter of getting to that heightened a situation so it comes out. I had many, many, many things, small things, I did in that day and the months before to prepare for that scene.”
Reinsve said she had to find Elisabeth’s “vigilance” as a “person who had a trauma,” where “you come to a new situation in this state … Elisabeth had experienced something in her life, and for me, it has to be very specific so it gets triggered by the situation she is in. All her sorrow and all her stress is so heightened that there is no way out of it than just to laugh. It’s nothing she can control. To get to that, you really have to understand on a deep level how [trauma] works in a person’s psyche. That’s what I love about the job. To go deeply into those details of how a person works on these small levels and then just hope that it will happen on the day.”
Reinsve said she also had the sound recordist Helge Bodøgaard tell her a joke on set to get the scene going. “He’s very funny, so I started laughing a bit at this joke. It’s really not that funny, and it’s impossible to translate. Then, I had these cues in the [lines] of the others that Elisabeth would be triggered by. For instance, the word ‘problem solving,’ because it’s such an impossible situation, they don’t know if it’s true or not but they’re trying to start to talk about it.”
Everyone in the audience is also laughing nervously alongside Elisabeth, the mania gets infectious, so wouldn’t her other actors share in that fit? Elisabeth, here, shares the screen with eccentric, stressed-out teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) and headmaster Jarle (Øystein Røger), as well as Armand’s classmate’s parents, Anders (Endre Hellestveit) and Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen). Add into the mix that Elisabeth is Sarah’s former sister-in-law, having been married to Sarah’s brother before he died tragically. Then, the question arises of deep-seated abuse in their shared family history.
“In the beginning, they did [laugh], but the camera was on me, and when we turned around, we had already done it for a few hours, and then it started getting more tragic,” Reinsve said.
“Armand” also features two seemingly from-nowhere movement sequences, including Elisabeth dancing almost like a broken marionette with the school janitor, and later when the film’s metaphor of Elisabeth being stripped for emotional parts turns literal: She’s physically assaulted, grabbed at, pushed around, and engulfed by a swarm of other parents in a stunning fever-dream sequence that’s like Bob Fosse’s worst nightmares.
“I met with the choreographer [Sigyn Åsa Sætereng] to do mainly the last part, but there was a misunderstanding. I made a dance based on how I felt her physicality would be in a state that’s not totally realistic,” Reinsve said, “But it’s what she’s going through. That was my suggestion for Halfdan. I misunderstood. [Elisabeth] was supposed to just walk through the hall. I showed it to Halfdan, and he loved it, and said, ‘Yes, let’s go, let’s use this.’ He has his heart outside his body, and he’s very brave, and if he loves something, he will use it and find a place for it.”
Reinsve said the second dance, in the film’s finale, was “very heavily choreographed … and I hurt my back in the middle of the shoot, so [the choreographer] would play me, and I would learn it really fast, and do it on the day.”
It wasn’t the choreography that left her injured, however. It was living in the stew of her character’s misery every day during filming. “When a person is in that state [of vigilance], the body is very tense, and you can’t really see it in the movie, but it’s actually extremely physical, this role. [Elisabeth] is tying in her whole body the whole time. I got really stiff from playing her,” she said.
Tøndel, who made a short film with Reinsve years prior, wrote the role specifically for Reinsve, which could’ve been disheartening for any other performer knowing she’s playing such an emotional wreck of an actress — in a role written expressly for her.
“We didn’t talk about it so much,” she said. “When he started writing this, it was before ‘The Worst Person,’ everything, and he wrote this actor that had been something big, and then she had kind of fallen apart a little bit. For me, it’s more about the two women [Elisabeth and Sarah] trying to break each other and have their truth stand, and using the situation between the kids as a tool to have their truth win.”
While she can’t share details, Reinsve already has another project with Tøndel in the works. “We have definitely planned to work together for a long time, in the future. We’re going to do a lot of projects together. We have a really, really strong and deep understanding of each other and we have very similar taste, and we have this urge to see how far we can go and push the limits together. We get really excited when we are on set. The first scene that we did was the scene where Elisabeth comes to the school. We hadn’t seen it, we hadn’t felt it. I walked in and met the young teacher, called Sunna, and I ran out of the classroom after Halfdan said, ‘Thank you, and cut.’ I ran out. He met me halfway, and we were surprised and excited.” They had found the character.
“Armand” hits theaters in New York starting November 29 for an awards-qualifying theatrical run. The film will have an official limited release on February 7, 2025, followed by a wide theatrical release February 14, 2025 from IFC Films.
