Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve said on Saturday it was a huge challenge playing two very different people who share the same body in the sci-fi drama “Another End” that is competing at the Berlinale for the festival’s top Golden Bear award.

“It was hard it, it was demanding,” she said of portraying on the one hand a woman writer who died in a car crash but whose personality has been implanted in the body of another woman who, when she’s not serving as host to the writer, is a sex worker in a super-posh bordello.

“You had to find specific thought patterns for both of them, how they live their own lives…to make them complex,” Reinsve, 36, said.

The challenge for audiences here, though, is keeping track of Reinsve. She not only plays two characters in Italian director Piero Messina’s dystopian drama about a company that enlists people to “host” the memories and personalities of people who have died suddenly, so their loved ones can part from them gradually, but she also has a starring role in another competition movie, American director Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man”.

Schimberg’s film stars Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as an actor suffering from a congenital disease that has horribly disfigured his face, which inspires Reinsve’s playwright character to write a play about him. When his disfigurement is cured through an experimental treatment, she falls out of love with him and falls for someone else — an actor named Oswald, played by Adam Pearson, whose face is also disfigured.

“I feel very proud and overwhelmed,” Reinsve said at a press conference, when asked what it was like to be appearing in two movies at the same festival. “And it’s interesting that the movies are so different.”

Even regular cinemagoers would be forgiven for not having heard of Reinsve, who once told an interviewer she’d thought of giving up acting to become a carpenter. But she is on a trajectory to join the likes of Kristen Stewart or Jennifer Lawrence in the new generation of women stars.

Although she’d appeared in a few roles beforehand, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s 2021 art-house hit “The Worst Person in the World” really put Reinsve on the cinema map. Her portrayal of a woman who, like Reinsve, has trouble settling on a career but will stop at nothing when she’s foumd the right man won her the best actress gong at Cannes.

Now she is in demand everywhere, starring not just in the two Berlinale entries but also in a Norwegian-directed zombie film, “Handling the Undead”, that was shown at the Sundance festival in January.

Reinsve, who grew up in a small town in Norway where as a child she hung around a hardware shop her grandfather had founded, has lived a life something like the impulsive characters she often plays. She struck out on her own at the age of 17, flying off to Edinburgh where she soon found her way into acting roles in the city’s famous Fringe Festival.

She went back to Oslo to study acting and turn professional but had just about had it, she told the Guardian newspaper in a 2022 interview, when she got a call from Trier for a role in “The Worst Person in the World.”

“So I had actually decided to quit. I had this big moment where I made that decision to do something else. And the very next day, Joachim called me. It was the weirdest coincidence,” she said.

Now she is enjoying the celebrity — and the contacts — that come from success in the film world.

“I love this part of making movies where we get to meet whoever sees it and talk about it, what it’s about for us and for you,” she said at the press conference. “Yeah, I’m very happy.”

By Michael Roddy