“It came completely out of nowhere,” she says, still sounding shocked by her win back in July. “It is the biggest thing I’ve ever experienced. People were running after us in the streets because the movie meant so much to them. It’s like a whole bunch of film nerds in that place! Honestly, I haven’t really been able to take it all in because it’s been so overwhelming.‘”

The award immediately turned Renate’s world upside down. “I’ve been travelling so much since Cannes, promoting the film,” she says. “I’ve been meeting a lot of very exciting people and directors, and reading scripts on a whole different level. I’m talking to people I’ve admired my whole life. I feel like my whole life has changed … even though I’m in my shed now,” she adds, laughing.

Renate, who bears a striking resemblance to American actor Dakota Johnson, is indeed speaking via Zoom from the shed in the back garden of her home in Norway. It is a peaceful space away from the main house and allows her to escape to do media interviews. But her two-year-old son has found her out here and begins to call from outside the door.

“He knows that I’m in here and he’s very sad,” she explains, looking out the window to see if he is in the company of an adult. “I just went to the States for the longest trip, and now he’s a little sick and everything is wrong. Because I never expected this to happen, it’s all a test on how to do it. Now I’m very thoroughly laying the plans so he can join everything.”

Despite interruptions at the shed door (Renate’s son is safely taken back into the house), she is grateful to be back home in Norway and away from the spotlight. “I think I’m very lucky here in Oslo, no one really bothers you,” she says. “It’s the ‘tallest poppy syndrome’.”

This familiar expression sounds as though it has a friendlier connotation in Norway than it does here, where there’s a tendency to cut people down for their success. “Everyone leaves everyone alone,” Renate explains. “If I walk now, people look but they leave me alone.

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“But if I’m in France or Italy and people want autographs and pictures, that’s very new to me. But I enjoy it. Luckily, I like people and I love this project, so that makes it easy. I think for the people who are shy or don’t like people too much, it must be very hard.”

Although comfortable with fame, Renate started doing theatre with no intention of ever becoming a star. “It was because I really loved it and I felt it was a place to figure out and play out whatever happens in my life, too,” she says. “It was a very therapeutic place to be and I just always loved it so much.”

Growing up in the small Norwegian village of Solbergelva (“It was just a road with some houses and farms”), Renate didn’t even see a film until she was in her mid-teens. Her earliest exposure to screen acting came from a most unlikely source.

“Every single day I watched Home and Away,” she recalls. “It was like three episodes a day … I was actually studying what they do, how they solve things, what the themes are about. I actually have a very strong connection to Home and Away .”

Renate stops suddenly. “Wasn’t the guy playing Thor in Home and Away?” she asks, with genuine curiosity. She is thrilled to be informed that indeed Chris Hemsworth had starred in the much-loved soap, along with many famous Australian actors whose first on-screen experience took place in Summer Bay. “That’s so interesting. It’s the start for so many people. Also me!”

“I have some options but I’m just trying to figure it all out. I feel so privileged that I have so many good offers.”

So what’s next for the Cannes award winner? “I have some options but I’m just trying to figure it all out,” she says with excitement in her voice. “I feel so privileged that I have so many good offers. But I have this one project that I’m very much looking forward to. It’s by the grandson of Ingmar Bergman [Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel]. He has written a script with me in the lead.

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“He’s been working on that for many, many years but he never got funding because it’s a lot of commercial things in Norway that get funding before arthouse things. But now, after I have won at Cannes, he will get the funding. So that is my next big thing.”

But for now, Renate is enjoying the comfort of home and the last glimpses of anonymity. “I still have a little bit of my own life left,” she says. “But I don’t know what’s going to happen next, after the US premiere and the Australian premiere and everywhere!”

But if it all gets too much for her, Renate knows she can just call it quits ... again.

The Worst Person in the World opens in cinemas on December 26.