Sentimental reasons

Renate Reinsve opens up about her chaotic' upbringing, the frustrations of American TV and why she loves working with Joachim Trier

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I've been trying to figure out what it is about Renate Reinsve.

In films such as "The Worst Person in the World," "Armand," "A Different Man" and now Joachim Trier's sublime family drama "Sentimental Value," the Norwegian actor, 38, has spent her last four-and-a-half years onscreen flirting recklessly, laughing uncontrollably, screaming in rage and dissolving in tears, all with an unpredictable vitality that has made her perhaps the most exciting performer working today.

But you cannot simply ask the subject of your cover story what has made her the current cinema's rawest nerve. So, inspired by her latest project - in which she plays Nora, a mercurial actor whose father (Stellan Skarsgård) returns from years of estrangement hoping to cast her in his autobiographical new film and shoot it in the family home-I ask Reinsve to join me on a historic house tour instead.

"I always feel people become more themselves when they're in their house," Reinsve tells me on a cloudless autumn morning at Hollyhock House, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1921 premonition of California modernism. But for an actor, at least one preparing for a role, that self can begin to fray at the edges: Thus Reinsve, an avowed architecture buff in the midst of her second major renovation, found herself unmoved by "Sentimental Value's" ravishing 1892 Dragestil ("dragon style") manse.