The acclaimed Danish actress Trine Dyrholm stars as an estranged mother whose arrival at a family celebration unsettles an already fragile emotional balance in Mads Mengel's feature debut The Guest, which won the Best Director Award for debut filmmaker Mads Mengel, as well as the Special Jury Prize.
Screen Anarchy sat down with Trine Dyrholm to discuss what drew her to The Guest, her enthusiasm for working with first-time feature directors, and the role improvisation played in shaping the film’s uneasy family dynamics. She also spoke about approaching Vibeke beyond the limits of a psychiatric diagnosis, finding the intelligence, vulnerability and volatility of a woman who can shift from charm to cruelty within a single scene.
Screen Anarchy: When you first read the screenplay, what made you want to join the project?
Trine Dyrholm: It wasn’t one thing. It was the combination of the complexity in the material, the vision Mads had for the film, and the possibility of working with Simon and Josephine. That whole package was the reason.
I had worked with both of them on the television series The Legacy, and Josephine is a very, very good friend of mine. We are extremely close. So in that sense, everything was telling me yes. But most of all, it was the material and Mads.
This is Mads Mengel’s first feature. Does working with a first-time feature director particularly interest you?
Yes. I find it very inspiring to be able to help a new director find their voice. A lot of the projects I have done recently have been first features. I did one last year and two this year. I did The Guest and Girlbeast, and I also did Second Victims. Poison was also a debut film.
I like doing that. We have a very interesting new generation coming through, and there are many good first features being made. It is inspiring.
Of course, Mads had already made a television series, so he was not completely inexperienced. Josephine had worked with him before and spoke very highly of him. I had also seen the series, and I could feel that he was skilled. But ultimately, it was the material, his vision and the way he talked about it. I became curious about him.
You also shot a pilot before making the film. Did that help convince you?
Yes. We made a small pilot for financing purposes, to help secure the funding. It was around eight minutes, and we shot the big scene near the beginning, around the table. It almost became a rehearsal space for the whole film.
We improvised and tried different things, and afterwards Mads and Christian wrote a lot of what we discovered into the screenplay. We found a way of playing together.
After that shooting day, I thought: We have to make this film. It was so much fun. I was completely in.
You have also worked as an executive producer. Does the producer in you become active when you are considering a new project?
I was an executive producer on Beginnings, but that happened because we couldn’t finance the film. We didn’t receive the funding, so I put my salary into it. I am also an executive producer on some other projects I have in development.
But for me, it is more about helping things happen: connecting people, supporting a project and getting it started. I don’t really separate myself into “the actor” and “the producer.” I see myself more as a collaborator. I am interested in making good films, finding good material, and bringing the right people together.
The film belongs to a strong Danish tradition of family dramas, and it inevitably brings to mind Thomas Vinterberg's CELEBRATION. Did that comparison concern you?
No, I wasn’t afraid of it. I think this film stands out in a different way and deals with other subjects. It is about a family and its challenges, so of course there are connections, but it is doing something of its own.
As Mads has said, we are always standing on one another’s shoulders. Dogme has inspired many things, and obviously there are references here. But there are also references to many other films. It is perfectly fine if people think of Celebration.
We have these kinds of family gatherings in Denmark. They are part of our culture. Perhaps they are not always exactly like the party in this film, but we do have them. And of course I thought of Celebration, because I was in it. But I thought of it only as something we were standing on the shoulders of.
The screenwriter Christian Bengtson has said that Vibeke was partly inspired by someone in his own family. How did you research her mental-health condition?
We didn’t want to name the diagnosis. Most of all, we did not want to play the illness. We wanted to play the human being behind it.
I did a lot of research. I watched videos involving different cases, and I have worked on other projects involving mental-health issues. Twice in my career, when I was 30 and again when I was 40, I performed Sarah Kane’s monologue 4.48 Psychosis. I have also played a woman with a traumatic brain injury. So I have researched this area in different ways throughout my career.
More specifically, I think Vibeke may suffer from bipolar disorder, although the film does not name it. I have also witnessed difficult situations through people I know. I have been standing nearby when things became challenging.
But that is why we did not want to define it too precisely. Otherwise, people come out afterwards and say, “A person with bipolar disorder would not behave like that.” The diagnosis is important, but it is not the entire point. It is one of the challenges within this family.
There is a line where Rikke says, “It is her personality.” I like that, because some of Vibeke’s behavior is also simply her personality. She likes to provoke. She enjoys pushing people. Then sometimes she goes too far and becomes brutal. There are many nuances.
The film is full of micro-aggressions, especially in Vibeke’s interactions with her children. How did you find the emotional logic underneath those moments?
The behavior has to be triggered by something emotional. That makes it possible to play. Take the bathroom scene in the morning, when Vibeke is borrowing mascara from Rikke. Vibeke is devastated because Rikke did not tell her about her girlfriend. She feels excluded and betrayed. Then she becomes like a child who punishes someone.
Rikke becomes aggressive in response, and suddenly Vibeke says, “That is what I’m talking about. You have to stand up for yourself.”
Those mechanisms are very complicated. Some of that scene was improvised and explored while we were shooting. We did different versions, and the filmmakers chose this one. The scene already existed, but not exactly in that form. We tried different things, and the material took us to different places.
You can only work that way when the director has a strong vision, when you have good material to stand on and when you are working with actors who are not vain, actors who dare to go somewhere and say, “Let’s see what happens.”
Vibeke holds herself together for much of the film, before everything finally erupts. Were you concerned that audiences would simply judge her as a bad mother?
That is up to people. They can judge her if they want to.
I don’t like judging anyone, and especially not my characters. I want to explore who they are. I want to understand their perspective and perhaps some of the chaos inside them.
Hopefully, the audience will also understand some of Vibeke’s inner chaos. It is perfectly all right if they think she is too much, or that she is too brutal, because in certain situations she is. But I hope they also have some feeling for her and some understanding of how difficult it is to be present when you were not really invited. I wanted her to be as complex as possible. Hopefully, people will recognize something in her, or in the family around her.
There is a certain masculine quality to Vibeke, in her bearing, her clothes and her energy. Was that intentional?
That came from the work we did with the very skilled hair, makeup and costume departments. They collaborated closely with Mads and me, and also with the actors playing the other characters. We wanted Vibeke to have a strong style. She is well-read and actually very intelligent. She is not someone you look at and immediately think of as a loser or an outsider.
She may not have been invited, but you cannot simply look at her and “see” mental illness. She is a person who has put together a way of presenting herself to the world. She is also a single mother. She has been both his mother and her mother, and perhaps she has had to carry some of the father’s role as well. That could be part of the more masculine quality you sense.
But we also wanted her to contrast with Frank and the other side of the family. Their world is more controlled. Everything has to be placed correctly; the party has to look right. Vibeke arrives with the curly hair, the glasses and a more chaotic energy. It is as though she is putting on her shell and saying, “I am a human being. I can go out into the world.”
There were many thoughts behind her appearance. I think it works very well. I love the curls and the glasses because they help her become a real person.
You are almost unrecognizable at first. Does that physical transformation help you enter the character?
Yes, and I love when that happens. For me, it becomes a kind of mask. You arrive in the morning, get the curly hair and put on the glasses, and suddenly it is easier to step into another person’s perspective and live inside it.
One of the film’s funniest and most revealing passages involves Vibeke discussing August Strindberg. Do you have a personal relationship with his work?
When I applied to drama school, I auditioned with Miss Julie. I also played Miss Julie onstage many years ago. At one point, I read quite a lot about Strindberg, although I don’t remember much of it now. But of course I am familiar with his work and his legacy.
At drama school, I also played Siri von Essen, who was married to him. There is a chamber play involving Strindberg, Siri and two other people, and I played her. So yes, I have had various encounters with Strindberg over the years.
How did that exchange develop during filming?
It was partly improvised. We had discussed what Vibeke might be talking about, and Christian and Mads came up with the Strindberg material. There was originally a lot of text, and I said, “I cannot learn all of that now. We are shooting tomorrow, and there is already so much other dialogue.”
They said it wasn’t important for me to reproduce everything. It was supposed to feel like small talk. Then the camera kept rolling. I said, “It’s about Strindberg.” From there, we started improvising as the characters.
Suddenly, it became an important little extension of a scene that was already important. You begin to see the difference between the two families. Rikke tries to participate, then says something, and Vibeke hits her.
All these things begin to reveal themselves. We knew the characters so well through the material that we could improvise inside it. That is why the scene stayed in the film.
There is a difference between improvising into the material and improvising away from it. Sometimes people improvise and it becomes “blah, blah, blah,” and of course it is cut out. Here, the improvisation made sense within the structure. Something else could be removed, while this new material could remain.
Strindberg himself experienced a mental breakdown and had an extremely troubled relationship with his daughter, so the reference carries a symbolic weight.
Exactly. That is why Mads and Christian were clever to choose Strindberg. The symbolism was already there. We could simply use it and allow it to work beneath the scene.
What else do you have coming up?
Girlbeast will come out at some point. We don’t know exactly when yet, but I think next year.
I also have a very interesting documentary, a hybrid film. I’m acting in it, or re-enacting things in it. It is difficult to explain, but it is very interesting.
Then I have a television series called The Danish Woman. It has already aired in Denmark, France and Germany, and it is travelling around. It is a black comedy dealing with very political subjects. I have also released an album because music is part of the series. You can find it on Spotify, and there is a vinyl edition as well. So if you are interested in vinyl, you can get The Danish Woman on vinyl.
You sound extremely busy.
I have been extremely busy. Recently, I have been doing concerts, vinyl signings and other things that are a little different from filming. Then I’m going to shoot something in August that I cannot talk about yet.
Can you offer even a small teaser?
There are some well-known people involved, but in a different way, I would say. It has a very interesting concept, although I’m not even sure “concept” is the right word for it. That is all I can say.
I also have a film coming out next year that I made with the American director Sara Driver. It is an independent film that we shot in Portugal earlier this year.
And then I have other projects waiting for financing. One is a Danish-Norwegian project that I initiated and developed as an executive producer. I will also act in it alongside a Norwegian actress. We started the project ourselves, and now we are waiting for funding.
So there are different things in development. And next year, there will also be a concert tour.
Cover image courtesy of Karlovy Vary Film Festival Servis.