Joachim Trier’s family drama has catapulted the Norwegian actress from an international unknown to Oscar and Bafta nominee
Sentimental Value’s Oscar and Bafta-nominated Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas could have ruined her future acting career many decades ago. When she was just two years old, her parents ran an amateur theatre group in Gol, Norway and young Inga thought she wanted to go on stage for her first performance in an outdoor summer play. But at the dress rehearsal, she simply said, “No, I don’t want to do it anymore.” She looks back with a laugh: “I was two. Some other kid did it.”
It would be years later before Lilleaas knew she was ready. She had studied psychology in Norway and then took a short acting course in New York, before returning home to Norway to study more seriously at Nord University, which specialises in the physical side of theatre and improvisation. “It was quite helpful to teach me how to put the mind away sometimes and listen to the body,” she remembers.
After graduating, Lilleaas immediately landed a lead film role in Yngvild Sve Flikke’s award-winning Women In Oversized Men’s Shirts (2015), and since then she has been working steadily in Norway across theatre, TV and film.
The role of Agnes in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value has catapulted the 36-year-old Oslo-based actress internationally, from Cannes premiere, to successful releases in multiple countries, signing with CAA, and now the Oscars and Baftas. (Lilleaas also continues to be repped by Curtis Brown Group in the UK and Team Players in Scandinavia.)
She recalls a fairly long casting process – she had never before worked with Trier but knew his casting director Yngvill Kolset Haga. “I liked the character. I started to feel during the audition process that I liked working with Joachim. There was an equal exchange.”
Lilleaas says Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt allowed her the freedom to bring her own take on Agnes. She is a peacekeeping young mother who takes a different approach to her sister Nora (Renate Reinsve) on the return of their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard). Only after the shoot did “Joachim and Eskil talk to me about how they thought the character of Agnes was going to be some comedic relief, a bit more goofy, but we never talked about that. I didn’t read it that way. There is lightness to her, but she has this fear of losing both her sister and her father.”
She was drawn in by the complicated on-screen family. “I certainly recognise the dynamics between the sisters, and some of the dynamic between the child and the parent,” says Lilleaas. “I appreciated the idea of the siblings as each other’s life witnesses and each other’s protectors at different stages in life.”
Lilleaas usually likes to conduct a lot of research when preparing for a role. “I love doing that, writing and Googling, sometimes just as procrastination,” she says with a laugh. But for Sentimental Value, the preparation was focused inwards.
“It’s not a historical character, it’s just human. The research is internal. It’s more listening to how does the body respond in these situations.” The group’s rehearsals also helped that preparation, some of them held in the locations for the shoot – such as the family home. “That gives us a lived-life aspect.”
Living the moment
Lilleaas praises Trier’s calm working manner, and focus on preparation: “It gives a lot of room and time for the emotional side.”
One scene where this approach proved its worth sees Nora visit Agnes’s house to talk about the father’s new film script, and they end up comforting each other in the bedroom. “For that scene, I didn’t know how I wanted to play it or the result I wanted out of it,” she says. “I tried to let my body be present and available to do the acting, and not be so brainy about it.”
Lilleaas gave Reinsve a hug in the moment – not written in the script – and improvised “I love you” in a unique Norwegian way that is not something siblings might say to each other. “It’s not like saying, ‘I’m fond of you.’ It’s the strongest declaration of love we have in Norwegian.”
That kind of ad-libbed response should serve Lilleaas well, as she has already started her next Norwegian feature, not yet announced. There is a script but, she adds: “There’s a lot of possibility for improv, which is intriguing.”
Lilleaas has been so busy on the road with Sentimental Value, and preparing for the new film, that she is not sure she has grasped the reality of being an Oscar and Bafta nominee. “It’s been a quick past few months, packed with impressions and travel,” says the actress. “Maybe in a year I can look back and digest it. For now it feels like I’m in a different dimension, in a wormhole or something.”
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