The Worst Person in the World (Movie)

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    In ‘The Innocents,’ Kids Behaving Deadly

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    Eskil Vogt, the Oscar-nominated co-writer of “The Worst Person in the World,” explores a childhood paradox in his new horror movie: how kids can be both innocent and cruel.It’s no biggie for horror movie villains to be rabid grannies or killer Santas. But what kind of monster kills a cat?In the new supernatural horror film “The Innocents,” that monster is a preteen named Ben (Sam Ashraf), and his gasp-inducing act early in the film is a hint of the sins to come by his, and other, little hands.“We still like to think that kids are pure angels,” Eskil Vogt, the film’s writer-director, said in a recent interview over video. “I think we need to face that the opposite is true.”Ben, who lives in a towering Oslo apartment complex, isn’t the only kid there with psychic powers. When young Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), her autistic older sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), and their mother and father move into the building, Anna miraculously regains her ability to speak. Anna and a neighbor girl named Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), who can hear thoughts, team up to call on their powers for (mostly) peaceful ends, flying under the radar of their clueless parents.But Ben, a bullied boy raised by a distant mom, struggles with a far more sinister power he’s not equipped to handle, and the consequences are deadly and heartbreaking.Rakel Lenora Flottum as Ida and Sam Ashraf as Ben in “The Innocents.”IFC MidnightA movie of icy dread, “The Innocents” unnervingly explores how children can be both uncorrupted and cruel, a paradox that can have deep emotional repercussions that linger well past the playground years. The young characters don’t question their otherworldly powers, nor do they fully comprehend the responsibility that comes with them. But they know enough not to tell their parents.Vogt was no different. On vacation as a kid, he remembers using an air gun to shoot a sea gull in flight; he saw the bullet make impact, but the bird didn’t fall. He kept it from his parents.“I remember walking around that day and going to bed that night thinking that this sea gull was dying slowly in agony somewhere because of me,” he said.Vogt said he drew on that and other fraught childhood decisions as he made “The Innocents.” The film (in theaters and on demand) arrives just months after he and his friend and longtime collaborator, the director Joachim Trier, shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay for their humanist dramedy “The Worst Person in the World.”In a separate video interview, Trier said if there’s a through line between both films, it’s how Vogt uses “form and visuality to make something that’s worth showing on a big screen.” If the terrors in “The Innocents” are more pernicious than sensational, Trier said it’s the product of Vogt’s deep affection for the films of Alain Resnais (“Hiroshima Mon Amour”) and other formalist cinema of the ’60s. “He’s hard core about that,” Trier said.Slow-burn horror, too. In 2014, Vogt wrote and directed the moody thriller “Blind,” about a paranoid sightless woman. Three years later he and Trier co-wrote Trier’s film “Thelma,” about a college student with telekinetic powers.A horror movie fan, Vogt said he was drawn to the films of David Cronenberg, especially the devilish man-child movie “The Brood” (1979), but also to Wolf Rilla’s “Village of the Damned” (1960), with what he called its “weird and special” youngsters.“I don’t think I’ve been as scared as an adult as I was as a kid,” Vogt said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesVogt said he also looked no further than his living room and his two children, ages 9 and 11, who “can be the best kids in the world and in an instant they can become raging lunatics.” He said it was because of open casting, not an intentional choice, that the kids in “The Innocents” are outsiders beyond their powers: Anna has autism, Aisha has vitiligo and Ben is a boy of color (Ashraf was born in Norway and is of Persian and Pakistani descent).“It wasn’t like they are magical because they’re special,” he added.What Vogt hasn’t made, he stressed, is an evil-kids movie.“It’s a story about basic humanity,” he said.“The Innocents” joins other recent projects about children on the dark side, including the new film adaptation of Stephen King’s “Firestarter” and the HBO dark comedy series “The Baby.”T.S. Kord, the author of “Little Horrors: How Cinema’s Evil Children Play on Our Guilt” (2016), said in an email that ​​diabolic kids have featured in horror with increasing frequency in recent decades as horror “wants to point out all the ways in which the human race is screwing up.”“We’ve devastated children and childhood for practically ever, now they’re striking back,” said Kord, who teaches German, film studies and comparative literature at University College London. Yet we have a societal stake in claiming that children are innocent, she added, “because their innocence defines us as a humane society.”What may unsettle viewers most about “The Innocents” is Vogt’s daring choice to assign villainy to tweens with at least some agency in their actions. In horror, kids are usually bad because of external forces (“The Exorcist”), or they’re teenagers who’ve already been messed up (“Eden Lake”). Of course, there are also fiendish fetuses (“The Unborn”) and blackhearted babies (“Grace”), but their consciousness is still unshaped and therefore particularly susceptible to outside diabolical forces.Flottum’s character goes for a swing in “The Innocents.”IFC Midnight“The Innocents” is closer in spirit to “The Bad Seed” and other horror films in the far more frightening middle, where kids do bad things because they haven’t totally figured out that other people have feelings.“During childhood we have to create our own set of values and morals and not rely on what our parents told us,” Vogt said. Eventually, he continued, “you have to do some of the stuff your mother said you shouldn’t do, and figure out if she was right or not.”It remains to be seen how kids behaving deadly in “The Innocents” will land with audiences. One critic wished that Vogt had focused “more on the harmless side of the children’s powers,” an indication of how strong the desire is to affirm childhood as a time of incorruptible purity.But “kids with powers have consequences,” Vogt said. So does just being a kid.“I remember lying in bed and hearing sounds and imagining the worst thing and how that would become part of my reality because I had no way of distinguishing between what’s real and not,” he said. “I would be completely and totally scared out of my mind. I don’t think I’ve been as scared as an adult as I was as a kid.” More

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      Shelf Life: Our Collections and the Passage of Time

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      Set off by a scene in a movie, a critic reflects on cultural baggage: “The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again.”The physical objects that represent pop-culture obsessions: A.O. Scott’s books and DVDs at home.Like a lot of other people, I enjoyed Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” a young woman’s coming-of-age story that’s also a spiky romantic comedy of sorts. But the reason I can’t stop thinking about this movie (which I can’t discuss further without risking spoilers, so be warned) has to do with its status as a Gen X midlife cri de coeur.The full cry — appropriately laced with self-mockery, self-pity and highly specific pop-cultural references — arrives in a single devastating scene near the end of the film. Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a graphic novelist who like the director is in his mid-40s, is dying of pancreatic cancer. Julie (Renate Reinsve), the film’s official protagonist, who had earlier broken his heart, comes to visit him in the hospital. She finds him playing furious air drums as “Back to Dungaree High” by the Norwegian death-punk band Turbonegro blasts in his headphones.“It’s such a trip just to survive,” the singer howls, and Aksel is preoccupied with matters of life, death and popular culture. He tells Julie that he spends most of his time listening to familiar music and rewatching his favorite movies, including “The Godfather,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and the films of David Lynch. “The world I knew has disappeared,” he laments.What was that world? It was “all about going to stores.”Scott writes, “I’ve surrounded myself with things, the most precious of which have been scratched, scribbled in, lent out or given away.”Or in at least one case, destroyed by something else precious to him.That description isn’t meant to trivialize his youthful pastimes and passions, but rather to convey their magic and meaning to a millennial whose primary experience of shopping is likely to consist of clicking on an icon rather than rifling through bins. Aksel goes on to rhapsodize about the record, comic-book and video emporiums he used to frequent.His pilgrimage stops may be particular to Oslo, but they have counterparts in every city. Julie, who works in a bookstore and dabbles in writing, is hardly oblivious to the utility and charm of physical media. But she doesn’t quite understand the intense emotion — the longing, the meaning, the sense of identity — that Aksel attaches to memories of an earlier style of consumption. This isn’t necessarily a difference of taste or sensibility. It’s more a contrasting relationship with the material aspects of culture, a different way of living in a world of things, and it defines the generational schism between them.I know which side I’m on. I don’t think of myself as a shopper, but the truth is that in my time on this earth I’ve rarely been able to walk past a book or record store without going in, or to walk out empty-handed. I’ve surrounded myself with things, the most precious of which have been scratched, scribbled in, lent out or given away. As Aksel says, “I’ve spent my life doing that — collecting all that stuff,” but not because of its monetary or even its sentimental value. Those objects begin as vessels of meaning and tokens of taste, but their acquisition becomes a kind of compulsion, emptied of its original passion. “I kept doing it when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions,” Aksel reflects. “Now it’s all that I have left: memories of useless things.”The comic books, action figures and artwork collected by George Gene Gustines, a senior operations manager for The Times and our comics correspondent.I don’t completely identify with Aksel. He is kinder, cooler (it took me some Googling to identify that Turbonegro song), a few years younger and a lot better looking than I am. But it isn’t enough for me to say, as people do these days, that watching him made me feel seen. The effect was more intimate, more shocking, more shameful, as if Trier had dumped out a laundry bag full of my favorite vintage band T-shirts on Aksel’s hospital bed for the whole movie-loving world to rummage through. Seen? I felt smelled.Not that this is all about me. What Aksel says to Julie confirms him as an especially sympathetic and self-aware specimen of a recognizable, not always beloved type: not a fan, exactly, but a highly opinionated hybrid of connoisseur, collector and critic. You might know a version of this guy from the novels of Nick Hornby (or the films adapted from them), notably “High Fidelity” and “Juliet, Naked.” Or maybe from movies by Kevin Smith, Noah Baumbach, Judd Apatow and other Gen X auteurs. He could be your older brother, your ex- or current partner, your best friend or the long-lost buddy you’re sort of in touch with on Facebook. Your dad, even. But then again, if you’re like me, the teen spirit you smell may be your ownIn real life, this kind of person isn’t always a guy. Popular culture often assumes as much, and assumes his whiteness, too, which is partly a failure of collective imagination, and partly a matter of whose cultural obsessions are taken as representative. Chuck Klosterman, perhaps the emblematic white male cultural critic of his (which is to say my) generation, somewhat inadvertently makes this point in his new book, “The Nineties,” when he implies that the release of Nirvana’s album “Nevermind” was a more significant world-historical event than the fall of the Berlin Wall.The bootleg concert T-shirts, vintage Macs and VHS tapes collected by Caryn Ganz, The Times’s pop music editor, and Richard the cat.In typical ’90s fashion, the claim is hedged with knowingness and booby-trapped with irony. Klosterman understands that there were plenty of people in the ’90s — and not only in Berlin — who never cared much about “Nevermind.” The appeal and the annoyance value of his book arise from the same source, namely his unapologetic, extravagant commitment to generalizing from his own experience. “The Nineties,” with the modest, generic subtitle “A Book,” is neither history nor memoir, but rather uses each genre as an alibi for the shortcomings of the other. Of course this is just one guy’s recollection of the stuff he saw, thought about, listened to and bought in the last decade of the 20th century. But it’s also, Klosterman periodically insists, an account of what that decade was really like, a catalog of what mattered at the time and in hindsight. You can argue with the second version — how can you write a cultural history of the American 1990s without so much as an index entry for “Angels in America”? — but not so much with the first. What the ’90s meant is open for debate. What the decade felt like, maybe less so.This is what makes Klosterman, who was born in 1972, a cheerful, mainstream American counterpart to Aksel’s gloomy, alternative-minded Nordic intellectual. They are both ’90s guys, driven to explain something that seems in danger of being forgotten or misunderstood to people who weren’t there. To a degree it’s the same something, but not quite the something either one thinks it is. Klosterman seeks to illuminate the reality of a unique and crucial period; Aksel tries to share with Julie the sources of his own sensibility. But the cultural reference points are red herrings. The deep motive is a longing to arrest and reverse the movement of time, to recover some of the ardor and bewilderment of youth.The art at the home of Roberta Smith, The Times’s co-chief art critic, and Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s senior art critic.The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again. The reluctant acceptance of this fact is the source of nostalgia, a disorder that afflicts every modern generation in its own special way. Members of Generation X grew up under the heavy, sanctimonious shadow of the baby boom’s long adolescence, among crates of LPs and shelves of paperbacks to remind us of what we had missed. Just as baby boomers’ rebellion against their Depression- and war-formed parents defined their styles and poses, so did our impatience with the boomers set ours in motion. But I’m not talking so much about a grand narrative of history as about what Aksel might call the useless stuff — the objects and gadgets that form the infrastructure of memory.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Renate Reinsve on 'The Worst Person in the World' and New Fame

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      At a dinner during the Cannes Film Festival in July, Renate Reinsve found herself so nervous in the company of famous actors that she spent the evening chatting with their bodyguards instead. When a photographer who had been taking pictures of Timothée Chalamet appeared near the group, she said, her new friends waved him over.“They were like, ‘She’s an actress, too,’” Ms. Reinsve, 34, recalled in an interview in January.She had flown to Cannes from Oslo, where she lives, for the premiere of “The Worst Person in the World,” in which she stars as Julie, a millennial woman in the midst of a quarter-life crisis, grappling with the pressure she feels to pursue a career, find a partner and form a family. It was Ms. Reinsve’s first lead role in a film.After some prodding, the photographer turned his lens to her. “He lifted his camera, and then he didn’t press the button,” she said. “I wasn’t worth it.”Ms. Reinsve won the Cannes award for best actress a few days later. And in the months that followed, the film, directed by Joachim Trier, made the festival rounds, where it garnered praise for Ms. Reinsve’s performance. Louis Vuitton asked her to become a brand ambassador. Just this week she was nominated for a BAFTA in the best actress category.At the end of January, Ms. Reinsve arrived in New York City to promote the film ahead of its American release on Feb. 4. Wearing a simple white dress and her hair in a ponytail for breakfast at Sadelle’s in Manhattan, she surveyed the tower of smoked salmon, cucumbers, tomatoes, dill and capers on the table and wondered if she would be able to eat despite her nerves. She had been up since 3 a.m., unable to sleep after she found out that she would appear on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” that evening.“There’s been so much going on,” she said.Ms. Reinsve has had a whirlwind six months ahead of the American release of “The Worst Person in the World.”David B. Torch for The New York TimesDuring the last six months, “The Worst Person in the World” has collected notable admirers, including former President Barack Obama, who included it on his list of favorite movies of 2021.In a video interview during the Sundance Film Festival, Dakota Johnson said the movie “wrecked” her. “I was crying in a way that was weird,” she said. “I was trying to make it less than what it was meant to be. I was trying to not cry as hard as my body wanted to cry.”The screenwriter and director Richard Curtis called the film “a complete masterpiece” in a conversation hosted by Neon, the film’s distributor, and Judd Apatow took to Twitter to say it was “stunning.”“Renate is playing so many complex and conflicting emotions all at once and somehow we understand exactly what she is feeling in every scene,” Mr. Apatow wrote in an email. “She is able to express how hard it is to decide what you want out of relationships and out of life in a way that is alternately dramatic, romantic, heartbreaking and funny.”For Ms. Reinsve, the whirlwind of recognition has been surreal. “I feel the same, but I feel people see me differently,” she said. “It’s a bit confusing.” She is aware of the slippery slope that intense and prolonged attention can lead to.What makes the film good, she reiterated over two interviews, isn’t just her. It’s the script, the director and the rest of the cast (including Anders Danielsen Lie and Herbert Nordrum, who play Julie’s boyfriends). “It’s dangerous to believe that you have more knowledge, or more insight into things than other people, or you’re better than other people,” Ms. Reinsve said.She is trying to live her life as simply as she did before all the buzz. For the most part, she does not read articles about herself.The film, directed by Joachim Trier, centers on Julie, a millennial woman in the midst of a quarter-life crisis.Kasper Tuxen/Neon, via Associated PressBut her father collects all the clips he can find, translates them and stores them in a file. “I’ve never seen him cry much, but this past half-year he’s crying,” she said. “He’s so proud.”In October, Ms. Reinsve’s newfound fame and her ambivalence toward it were palpable at a party that followed the screening of “The Worst Person in the World” at the Viennale, Vienna’s international film festival. Guests tentatively approached Ms. Reinsve — at the hotel bar, in the bathroom — to compliment her performance, as well as the gold Dior suit she was wearing.Ms. Reinsve was friendly and chatty, but as the night went on, she was drawn to the mix of salsa, pop and reggaeton playing in the ballroom. Eventually, with the help of a friend, she swapped her black heels for hotel slippers and hit the dance floor, from which she emerged an hour or so later, her blazer in one hand, skin glazed in a light sheen of sweat and hair tousled.Existential QuestionsMs. Reinsve grew up in Solbergelva, a village in Norway that she described as more of “a road between two places.” She called her upbringing “complicated.”“I didn’t have a good time growing up,” she said. Acting at a local theater became her solace.At 16, Ms. Reinsve stopped going to school and left her home. She wanted to run away to Costa Rica or another warm country but could only afford a ticket to Edinburgh. There, she had enough money for one week in a hostel.She tried to find work, but no one would hire her. Eventually, the owner of the hostel took pity. “He asked, ‘Have you ever poured a beer before?’” Ms. Reinsve said. “‘No.’ ‘But you worked in a bar?’ ‘No.’ ‘OK, but you’re over 18?’ ‘No.’ He rolled his eyes and said, ‘Fine, you’re hired.’”Ms. Reinsve said she always felt very different from other people in her family, and that from an early age, she started asking a variation of the kinds of questions that she still wrestles with today. “Like, ‘How do people relate to each other and why?’” she said. “It kind of started happening because of my complicated relationship to some people in my life.”As she grew older, and her relationships grew more complex, the questions evolved. “I would ask, ‘Why did I end up with this person?’” she said.“Her vulnerability in front of the camera, her ability to go deep and show complexity is what’s really interesting about her,” Mr. Trier said of Ms. Reinsve, pictured here with Anders Danielsen Lie.via Sundance InstituteMs. Reinsve met Mr. Trier more than a decade ago, when she was still studying acting at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and had two lines in one of his movies, “Oslo, August 31st.”Because Mr. Trier wanted a certain kind of light for the scene she was in, Ms. Reinsve was on set in the wee hours for more than a week. “She varied the takes and came up with 20 ideas and felt very free in front of the camera,” Mr. Trier said in a phone interview. “Most young actors at that age would have gotten lost in the toolbox.”Over the next years, Ms. Reinsve and Mr. Trier ended up having deep conversations about love, choice and other existential matters.“She has the star quality where you can put her in a part and she will be attractive and make the image pop,” Mr. Trier said. “But she has another dimension. She’s an incredible actor. Her drama abilities, her vulnerability in front of the camera, her ability to go deep and show complexity is what’s really interesting about her.”David B. Torch for The New York TimesLetting Go and Giving InRight before the role of Julie came along in 2019, Ms. Reinsve had been on the brink of quitting acting altogether and pursuing a different career: carpentry.What she didn’t know was that Mr. Trier for many years had been developing a film with her in mind. He recalled going to lunch with Isabelle Huppert, a friend, in 2017 in Oslo. Ms. Huppert was in town to see Robert Wilson’s play “Edda”; she told Mr. Trier how much she’d enjoyed the performance of an actress wearing a purple dress onstage. “That’s Renate Reinsve,” he said. “I’m writing her a film.”Though by 2019, Ms. Reinsve had found some success in Norway’s theater scene, acting in both experimental and classical productions, she felt exhausted by the demands of the work and frustrated by the two-dimensional roles offered to her in film and television.After buying a house in Oslo, Ms. Reinsve discovered the joys of handy work and renovation, and was ready to enroll in a carpentry program. Then came the call from Mr. Trier.With the Cannes win and everything that has followed, carpentry has fallen to the wayside. “My house is falling apart now,” Ms. Reinsve said in a call from Norway.Looking back, she said the decision to quit acting was somewhat freeing. “A part of growing up is just letting go of the expectations of what life should be like,” Ms. Reinsve said. “That’s something that you lose — what things could have been — and that can feel like a big heartbreak. But it’s also a relief if you go through that and just relax. When I thought that I gave up acting, it was a big relief.”Herbert Nordrum and Ms. Reinsve in “The Worst Person in the World.” He plays Eivind, one of Julie’s love interests.NeonAcceptance and letting go, and all the pain and pleasure that comes with it, is at the heart of “The Worst Person in the World.” Ms. Reinsve’s Julie wrestles with universal questions: What kind of career does she want? Does she want to be a mother? How does she know when a relationship is over? What constitutes infidelity? As Julie moves through different stages of her life, she has to accept that in terms of consequences, even indecision can be a decision.The film embraces the idea that identity is dynamic and can vacillate wildly over time. “We are always forced to try to define ourselves as one thing,” Mr. Trier said. “And none of us recognize ourselves as one thing. We are all ambivalent and chaotic.”In portraying Julie’s decision paralysis, Ms. Reinsve wanted to dig into the messiness and show the good that can be found in a position of uncertainty. In one scene, when Julie is fighting with her boyfriend, some of her anger is driven by his need to analyze their relationship. “Everything we feel, we have to put into words,” Julie says. “Sometimes, I just want to feel things.”Ms. Reinsve said she improvised those lines on set. “She’s unsure and she’s insecure about stuff, and that’s a good place to start,” Ms. Reinsve said. “Nowadays, you’re supposed to have a strong opinion about everything and know who you are. But then you miss out on so much of the process of becoming the you that would be a more happy being.” More

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      BAFTA Nominations List: ‘Dune' and ‘The Power of the Dog’ Lead Awards

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      Dennis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic and Jane Campion’s western secured the most nominations in a lineup notable for its diversity.Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Power of the Dog,” which was nominated for eight BAFTA awards on Thursday.Kirsty Griffin/Netflix, via Associated PressLONDON — The unpredictability of this year’s award season continued on Thursday when the nominees were announced for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic “Dune” was nominated for best film at the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, as was “Don’t Look Up,” the climate change satire starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jane Campion’s tense western “The Power of the Dog.”Those films will compete against “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s black and white movie based on his childhood in Northern Ireland, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ’70s coming-of-age romance “Licorice Pizza.” But of those movies’ directors, only Campion and Anderson were also nominated for the best director prize. They will compete in that category against several directors lesser known in the United States: Aleem Khan, the director of the British movie “After Love”; the French director Julia Ducournau for her Cannes-winning horror movie “Titane”; Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the Japanese director of “Drive My Car”; and Audrey Diwan, the French director of the abortion drama “Happening,” which was the unexpected winner of the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival.The BAFTA nominations, which were announced in a YouTube broadcast, are often seen as a bellwether for the Oscars, because of an overlap between the voting constituencies for both awards.Learn More About ‘Don’t Look Up’In Netflix’s doomsday flick, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth.Review: It’s the end of the world, and you should not feel fine, writes the film critic Manohla Dargis.A Metaphor for Climate Change: With his apocalyptic satire, the director Adam McKay hopes to prompt the audience to action. Meryl Streep’s Presidential Turn: How the actor prepared to play a self-centered scoundrel at the helm of the United States.A Real-Life ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment: The film revives memories of a nail-biting night in the Times newsroom two decades ago.“Dune” secured 11 BAFTA nominations, the most overall, although many are in technical categories like costume and production design. “The Power of the Dog” secured eight nominations, the second highest, with three of those in the acting categories.This year’s list also includes some acting nominees that may not be to be on the Oscars’ radar. The nominees for best actor, for instance, include Stephen Graham for “Boiling Point,” a British movie set behind the scenes in a restaurant, and Adeel Akhtar for the British romance “Ali & Ava,” as well as big names like Will Smith (“King Richard”), Benedict Cumberbatch (“The Power of the Dog”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“Don’t Look Up”) and Mahershala Ali (“Swan Song”).The nominees for best actress similarly include the British actress Joanna Scanlan for her role in “After Love,” about a white Muslim convert who uncovers her husband’s secret past, as well as Lady Gaga (“House of Gucci”), Alana Haim (“Licorice Pizza”), Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) and Tessa Thompson (“Passing”).Amanda Berry, the chief executive of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which gives out the awards, said in an interview that the diversity of this year’s nominees was partly down to changes introduced in 2020 to encourage voters to watch more widely among the nominated movies. Before they cast their ballots, voters must now watch a random selection of 15 films via an online portal, to ensure they don’t just focus on the most-hyped movies, Berry explained. How much overlap there is between the BAFTAs and Oscars nominees will soon become clear. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science is scheduled to reveal the nominees for this year’s Oscars on Tuesday.The winners of the BAFTAs are set to be announced on March 13 at a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and Berry said she expected the event would return to its usual, pre-pandemic format. Last year, nominees attended via video link, but Berry said she expected the awards to be given out in person in March, and that the glamour of the red carpet would be back. More

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      He’s a Doctor. He’s an Actor. He’s an Indie Heartthrob.

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      Actors have a long history of indulging in side projects: Some use their off time to write books, while others even front rock bands. But it’s fair to say that few thespians navigate a dual career quite like Anders Danielsen Lie, who currently stars as a lingering love interest in both “Bergman Island” and “The Worst Person in the World” — an indie-film doubleheader that prompted one critic to dub him “the art house’s next great ex-boyfriend” — while still working full-time as a doctor in Oslo.“It’s been overwhelming,” Lie, 43, told me over a recent video chat, and he wasn’t kidding: In early January, he was named best supporting actor by the National Society of Film Critics even as he worked three days a week at a vaccination center in Oslo and two days a week as a general practitioner. “It feels kind of abstract because as an actor, the most important part of making a movie is the shoot itself,” he said. “Then, when the film is coming out, it’s kind of a surreal experience.”Expect things to get even more surreal as the acclaimed “The Worst Person in the World” finally makes its way into American theaters on Feb. 4. In this romantic dramedy from the director Joachim Trier, Renate Reinsve — who won the best-actress prize for the role at the Cannes Film Festival — stars as Julie, a young 20-something trying to figure out her future. For some time, she takes up with Lie’s character, Aksel, an older, charismatic comic-book artist, and adopts his settled life as her own. But even when they break up and Julie discovers new pursuits, she finds her bond with the cocksure Aksel hard to shake.Lie with Renate Reinsve in “The Worst Person in the World”Kasper Tuxen, via Sundance InstituteLie previously collaborated with Trier on the well-reviewed films “Reprise” (2008) and “Oslo, August 31” (2012), but “The Worst Person in the World” has proved to be something of a breakthrough: Already, the internet has crafted video tributes to his character, and the film has struck a chord with audiences who prefer simple, human stakes to superhuman ones. “It felt like we made a very local thing from Oslo, and we were afraid if anybody else in the world would understand,” Lie said. “But people on the other side of the planet can identify with it. That’s what is so nice about feature films, they kind of bring people together.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.With Aksel and Julie, it feels like the qualities that drew them to each other eventually drive them apart. How would you sum up their relationship?He’s good at articulating her emotions and thoughts, and that’s something she probably wanted at an earlier stage in their relationship, but at this point, she’s just annoyed by it. He’s a pretty kind person, but he is also, in a subtle way, trying to dominate her by using language as his tool, because that’s what he’s good at.Is Aksel a “bad boyfriend,” as a recent Vanity Fair article asserted?I don’t see him as a bad boyfriend at all, actually. She’s not bad; he’s not bad; they’re just human. They are put in situations where they have to make hard choices and end up feeling like the worst people in the world, but it’s not really their fault. It’s life’s fault, in a way.In the film, we watch Julie swipe between different identities, trying on new jobs, new passions. Did you act the same way at that age?I personally thought that my 20s and 30s were hard, tough years, because I spent so much time trying to figure out who I was and what to do. I still haven’t made that choice, but that doesn’t bother me so much anymore. I’m happy enough to have two kids and a wife. Maybe it’s as simple as that.When you were younger, did you feel pressure to make an ultimate choice between acting and medicine?This has been my ongoing identity crisis.Lie is the son of an actress and a doctor who “ended up being both!” he said. “I probably should go into psychoanalysis or something.”David B. Torch for The New York TimesMaybe that’s just the bifurcated life you feel most suited to.It’s definitely a bifurcated life, and sometimes it feels like an identity crisis because it’s just a lot of hustle making the calendar work out. It’s hard to combine those two occupations, and sometimes I also wonder a little bit who I am. I’m trying to think that I’m something deeper than that: I’m not the doctor or the actor, I’m someone else, and these are just roles that I go into.Your mother is an actress. Did that affect the way you regard an actor’s life?My mother is not the typical actress — she’s not a diva or anything like that. She’s a very ordinary person, and I think it’s important to have a foot in reality if you want to portray people onscreen with confidence and credibility. But I’ve grown up seeing how it is to be an actress and how it is to be a doctor, and ended up being both! I probably should go into psychoanalysis or something.Your father was a doctor. That pretty much split you right down the middle, doesn’t it?Exactly. Maybe it’s an inheritable disease.Does one career inform the other?Working as an actor has improved my communication skills as a doctor because acting is so much about listening to the other actors and trying to establish good communication, often with people that you don’t know very well, and that reminds me a little bit of working as a doctor. I meet people, often for the first time, and they present a very private problem to me, and I have to get the right information to help them. It’s a very delicate, hard communication job, actually.“I have, many times, asked myself why I keep doing this, because I’m very neurotic as a person,” Lie said. David B. Torch for The New York TimesYou made your film debut when you were 11 in a film called “Herman.” How did that come about?My mother had worked with the director, so she knew he was searching for a boy my age, and she asked if I was interested in doing an audition. I didn’t really know what I had signed up for — I was 10 years old, and it felt like just a game that we were playing. I remember when the director wanted me to do the part, he came to our house with flowers and said, “Congratulations,” and I was frightened because I realized, “Now I really have to play that role and deliver.” For the first time, I felt this anxiety of not doing a good job, the exact same feeling I can get now in front of a shoot that really matters to me. I can be scared of not rising to the occasion.After that film, you didn’t work again as an actor for 16 years.“Herman” was an overwhelming experience. I felt like I was playing with explosives. I was dealing with emotions and manipulating my psyche in a way that was kind of frightening.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More