Nordic Film Talks-podcast by Wendy Mitchell and Nordisk Film & TV Fond.

It’s going to be a busy few weeks for Danish actress Trine Dyrholm – she’s at the Berlinale with the world premiere of Jeanette Nordahl’s second feature Beginnings (Begyndelser), and then she’ll be in Los Angeles on March 2 to attend the Oscars, where Magnus von Horn’s The Girl With The Needle (Pigen med nålen) is nominated for Best International Feature. Both films are supported by Nordisk Film & TV Fond.

Even for one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed actresses, the roles in these two films have proved uniquely challenging. In Beginnings, she plays a woman on the verge of separating from her husband when she has a stroke; as she and her family navigate her new challenges, she and the husband reconsider their commitment to each other.

“This is a story that is so much celebrating the imperfection of life, and trying to accept that you can’t control life. I think that’s a beautiful message,” Dyrholm says in the latest episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast.

Dyrholm is so proud of the way the whole film team wanted to bring authenticity to the project. “Jeanette invited in a lot of experts and was very careful, and very respectful, because it’s a story that is also very personal to her.” Dyrholm worked with rehabilitation experts who would help someone walk for the first time after a stroke, or swim using only one side of their bodies.

“I’ve never done a character with this kind of condition before,” she says, although for her role in The Almond and the Seahorse she researched brain injuries. Beginnings is not only focusing on her character’s limitations, of course. “You see how she struggles, but you also see how she really fights to get back to a different level of existence, and acceptance.”

She stars opposite David Dencik, reuniting the pair after their Berlinale-winning film A Soap (En Soap, 2006).

Dyrholm has too many esteemed credits to mention them all, but some other highlights include Festen, Love is All You Need (Den skaldede frisør), In A Better World (Hævnen), The Commune (Kollektivet), Nico, 1988, Queen of Hearts(Dronningen) and Margrete-Queen of the North (Margrete den første), as well as TV’s The Legacy (Arvingerne). Next to premiere will be Benedikt Erlingsson’s first TV series The Danish Woman (Danska konan), which will have its world premiere in late March at Series Mania’s International Panorama section. She plays Ditte, who retires from the Danish Secret Service and moves to Reykjavik, where she believes the end justifies the means when she needs to help her new neighbours.

In The Girl with the Needle, Dyrholm plays Dagmar Overbye, who is a real killer from Danish history. Rather than a straightforward biopic of Overbye detailing her crimes, von Horn and Line Langebek’s script instead focuses on a young factory worker in 1919 Copenhagen, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), who Dagmar meets only halfway through the film.

“The way that they approach the script is telling a much bigger story that only a biopic of this woman. It is a critique of society. It's a film about the unwanted – the unwanted kids, the unwanted women, the unwanted men who came back from the war with PTSD.”

She had already been friendly with Sonne for several years, since Dryholm saw Sonne in a student film and they met accidentally in a Copenhagen café. Dyrholm remembers, “It's eight years ago actually that we met each other. So we have been friends, and we have exchanged all kinds of creative thoughts and talked about character work. The Girl with the Needle is very complicated, it’s challenging characters. And it helps that we had so much faith in each other – also with Dagmar and Karoline there is a lot of mirroring going on with those women, so it felt very natural for Vic and me… We have the same interest in complexity and not always doing the character in a straight way – we both like to explore.”

Dyrholm did her own research about Overbye’s history, but then she also learned when to “put away” the reality “because it can sometimes narrow your intuition”. She also spent a lot of time with von Horn discussing his vision for the film and the character. He helpfully guided her to some inspiring filmic references – including Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse and David Lean’s Oliver Twist.

Dyrholm is very proud of this film’s Oscar nomination, because “it is a film that was fought for for so many years, it has not been an easy film to finance, it has not been an easy film to develop. I’m just very proud that our film in black and white, as complex as it is, can actually get this much attention.”

In the podcast episode, Dyrholm also talks about how she got her start as a singer; her memories of the special community atmosphere shooting Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 Festen; and why she sees acting as an exploration.