Kristine Frøseth wasn’t always the lead actress in her family. As a child, Frøseth would choose instead to stand by her more extroverted sister’s side, “supporting her, doing lighting and maybe saying a line here or there,” as the elder Froseth would put together sketches to entertain the family. “I was always super shy, didn’t really dare to sing or perform, and even in school, I didn’t dare to do drama—it was way too intimidating,” she confesses over a Zoom call a couple of days after the Cannes Film Festival has wrapped. 

This year, Frøseth featured in one of the most anticipated titles at the Festival (albeit one which was not in Competition, thus not eligible for any prizes). But Her Private Hell, Nicolas Winding Refn’s decade-in-the-making return to cinema after a near-death experience and a couple of ventures into streaming series’, was one of the films everyone wanted to watch. And watch it I did, at a special screening introduced by Refn himself, glued to my seat, at once terrified and mesmerized. For most of the film, I remained in awe of Frøseth's ability to wear the most impossible-looking costumes (in a good way), but also of her acting prowess and her infectious joy—something so apparent it hits this writer even across a computer screen, while we chat long distance.

At the moment, Frøseth is in Glasgow, filming the much-anticipated third season of the Apple TV+ period series The Buccaneers, where she plays Nan St. George, an American girl who brings, you guessed it, an infectious joie de vivre to stuffy England, in the streaming adaptation of Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel. 

Soon, Frøseth will star in another Wharton adaptation—this one the series version of The Age of Innocence, which Martin Scorsese turned into a film in 1993 featuring Winona Ryder in the role of May Welland. Frøseth will pick up the role of May in the upcoming limited series for Netflix, and admits that the story has been expanded: this time, British screenwriter and showrunner Emma Frost has turned it into a more “modern version.”

This is, as Frøseth tells me, Frost’s “interpretation and idea of where [the story] could have possibly gone, where the characters end up going.” Whereas in The Buccaneers Frøseth plays Nan in contemporary shades and a modern accent, for May the actor had to learn to talk with what a Transatlantic accent, and had etiquette classes, since the series is “very of the times,” concluding that it proved “really exciting to commit to that world.” The Age of Innocence takes place in New York City during the Gilded Age, the period leading up to the start of the 20th century, marked by great industrial wealth as well as social inequality, due to the rapidly increasing urban expansion. 

While we’re talking about fashion and 20th-century etiquette, I question Frøseth on her idea of elegance. “I think elegance comes down to confidence and self-love mostly,” the actress replies, and confesses that she’s going through a phase with personal style. “I’m trying to figure out who I am, a little bit more.” This humble attitude to dressing resulted in Frøseth walking the red carpet in Cannes for Her Private Hell in a stunning black and candy rose Giorgio Armani gown. All pink, corseted and looking like a modern version of a Greek goddess, the look “just made my inner child so happy,” Frøseth admits, “and I’m trying to listen to my stylist [in Cannes, it was Sandra Amador] a little bit more, instead of just seeing what everyone else is doing—there is so much inspiration everywhere!”

In Her Private Hell, a neon operatic “glam monster film” as Refn described it during a press conference in Cannes, Frøseth plays Hunter, a young woman with stars in her eyes who comes to inhabit a world she knows nothing about, to her misfortune. Here too, clothing played a big part in the actress’ process. “Nicolas, I think for all of us, really enlightened us to a different way of working,” the actor confesses, “he did play a lot of music, but with clothes, he did change my perspective, putting me into the stuff that Hunter would wear, which was very tight and very constricting.” Frøseth explains further, “I like to wear oversized clothes and baggy things and hide my body and Hunter is very much showing everything off, and [the clothing] would just inform my movements.”

Frøseth, a former model, first gained attention as an actress in 2019, playing the titular character in the series Looking for Alaska, based on the popular young adult novel by American author John Green. “Through my modeling agency, I got this audition for Looking for Alaska when it was supposed to be a film, with a different production company and director and everything,” she admits. “I had loved the book; I knew the book really well,” but “I didn’t know what an audition was.” So she made a reel of herself acting out different scenes she thought Alaska would be in and sent that off. During the audition process, Frøseth met her team “that I still am with today and lucky they signed me,” and then, through something she describes as “luck,” as well as meeting the right people, her name got around and she ended up not only starring in the Hulu series, but also in The Society for Netflix, which aired the same year but wasn’t renewed due to the 2020 pandemic. 

Frøseth's recent film credits include the acclaimed thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. She also starred in Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick (2022), which premiered at Sundance. She has appeared as young Betty Ford in Showtime limited series The First Lady (2022), starred in The Assistant (2019) and Birds of Paradise (2021), and in 2024, the actor was featured in Oh, Canada, directed by Paul Schrader. She will next be seen in the British horror film The Face of Horror, written and directed by Anna Biller, which follows an unfaithful widower who is haunted by his former wife after her death.

Despite a long list of credits, Frøseth, of course, thinks about what she would have done had she not gone into acting. She confesses she would have liked to study neuroscience. “I’m very fascinated in human behavior and the brain,” she says. While she admits that at the moment the prospect is off the table: “Maybe in another world or maybe, you know, in a few years, I’ll tap into that, I think that could be really, really interesting,” she says.

 The first film the actor remembers watching is Alfonso Cuarón’s A Little Princess (1995) but also The Secret Garden, the 1993 fantasy drama directed by Agnieszka Holland, featuring the late, great Maggie Smith. “I remember them very vividly because my dad would always watch them with me, and it was a nice bonding experience; not much was said, but it was always a nice thing we would do together—so that always stays with me.”

To confirm her ongoing busy schedule and versatility, in 2025 Frøseth starred in the Off-Broadway play All Nighter, written by Natalie Margolin and directed by Jaki Bradley, where she portrayed Darcie, a role she played alongside co-stars Havana Rose Liu, Kathryn Gallagher, Julia Lester, and Alyah Chanelle Scott. In Her Private Hell, the actor reunites with Liu, who plays the “wicked stepmother” role in a film inspired as much by Danish childhood fairytales, as by the constant TV channel surfing Refn remembers doing as a teenager. 

With Refn, the actor also connected on a cultural level—she is Norwegian American, and the filmmaker hails from Denmark. “We understand each other on a different level just because of that, they’re very similar cultures,” she admits about their connection. Each morning during shooting, the filmmaker arranged for a traditional breakfast selection to be laid out, “There was a big table with different spreads,” Frøseth explains. “I love liver pâté and cucumber and beets, and they would just have all those Scandinavian delicacies that I grew up with. It was so nice just eating together, bread and cheese… it’s just so down to Earth!” What was also down to Earth about Refn’s style of directing was his use of the cast’s and crew’s time. “We wrapped reasonably early every day, pretty much at five or five-thirty, because people wanted to go back to their families,” Frøseth says. “There’s just these values that I really respect with Scandinavian cultures.” 

The filmmaker and the actor also bonded on their use of music, to create a mood and get into character, which Frøseth admits is part of her method. Refn “had two or three songs [on set] that he would play on repeat. There was always music,” she confirms, “and sometimes, if I did get in my head too much, we would just do the scene with a song over it, not even listening to the dialogue.” Although during filming one of the songs the Danish filmmaker would play on repeat was “Follow Me” by Amanda Lear, the final soundtrack for Her Private Hell was composed by the Italian maestro Pino Donaggio, whose musical creations have been featured in films by Brian De Palma, Nicolas Roeg, and Dario Argento. 

During the press conference for the film in Cannes, Frøseth admitted she had initially found the idea of working with Refn “extremely intimidating; he really pushed you into the deep end, but with so much love and care,” and yet was rewarded by it all, because “he believes in you and makes you challenge yourself in the best way possible.” She concludes, “I’m grateful for the experience. I’ve never been so immersed; the rhythm, the pace, the stillness is just so incredible.”

Photographed by Carlos Duro Yagüe

Styled by Aartthie Sashi Mahakuperan

Written by E. Nina Rothe 

Hair: Davide Barbieri at A-Frame Agency using Hair by Sam McKnight

Makeup: Bari Khalique at Forward Artists

On-Site Producer: Jack So at Aalto Production

Retoucher: El Retocador 

Styling Assistant: Mairead Corry

Photo Assistants: Valentina Galofre and Joe Gardner

Location: Penthaus Studios