The Rise Of Joachim Trier

At one point early in her career, Jessica Henwick pulled an all-nighter blowing up balloons. The Surrey-born actress was scraping by in Los Angeles, making ends meet working as a set dresser on film sets. The task? Prepare a wedding scene that required roughly two thousand balloons. When the production’s air tanks ran out, she had to f inish the job by hand—or rather, by mouth.

Be it the embroidered certainties of historical drama or the controlled panic of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, we are living through a moment that makes escapism feel especially potent. Of late, Nicole Brydon Bloom has become a compelling presence in both genres. On HBO's The Gilded Age and Hulu's Paradise, she plays women who arrive as polished surfaces that hide ill intentions beneath—duplicitous characters who themselves are playing well-choreographed roles. Offscreen, Bloom comes across as markedly more grounded: a New York actor whose life, even as it has grown more public, seems oriented toward privacy, and the ordinary rituals that keep a person sane.

It seems fitting to start with a memory. Twenty years ago, more or less, sinking for the first time into the world of Joachim Trier watching his debut feature Reprise, stumbling out of the Angelika dazed afterwards, as if surprised to find myself in New York City and not Norway. I think it was the Angelika? I’m almost sure. Or maybe that’s where I saw Oslo, August 31 a few years later. Maybe both films played there? Memory, that trickster. Of course, this is fitting, too, given that one of Trier’s preoccupations, as a filmmaker, is the “jumbled” way we process the past, as he’s put it.

It’s a December morning in Miami, and Zoe Buckman is taking me on a brief tour of her temporary kingdom: a hotel room somewhere above the chaos of Art Basel. Moments earlier we'd been discussing Brooklyn brownstones—ours are in the same neighborhood—and she compliments her Zoom view of mine, though I know for a fact hers is prettier. “I fucking love our neighborhood,” she replies.

On a blustery Vienna night in December 1896, Felix Salten walks into Café Griensteidl. The novelist sees his friend Karl Kraus sitting across the room, walks over, and slaps the man twice across the face. The entire café falls silent. Then, one imagines, someone orders another coffee. Kraus, the Nobel-nominated satirical essayist, was then a sharp-faced, twenty--two-year-old who had spent the better part of the year publicly excoriating everyone in the room.