A few years ago, an article in a British paper described Trine Dyrholm as Denmark’s answer to Helen Mirren. Right now, for the record, let’s establish that Trine Dyrholm is not an answer to anybody else. Whether playing the founder of a hippy commune, a faith healer, Velvet Underground singer Nico or Gro, the Viking gallerist vying for control of the family estate in the Scandi series The Legacy, she incarnates every character with an immediate vitality that makes you temporarily forget that you have ever seen her play anything else. She’s one of the greats.

When I speak to her, she is packing to go away for the weekend. She and her husband both turned 50 this year and they are having a family celebration in a small cottage on an island. There will also be a trip on an old sailing boat – not their own boat, she adds hastily, as if worried about seeming overly grand.

“We just have to pack a lot of wine and buy a lot of food and drive to the island. It’s going to be so nice!” she says excitedly. “To be in nature, that’s what it’s about.” She is hugely pleased with being 50. “I don’t know why, but I feel so privileged after turning 50. I mean I felt privileged before, but turning 50 is definitely something I really like.”

We are discussing Margrete: Queen of the North, a medieval costume drama about power, morality and a ruler’s internal battle between private sentiment and public duty. It draws on the true story of the first Queen Margrete, who ruled Denmark from the late 1380s until her death in 1412, ostensibly as regent to her adopted son Erik.

In 1402, a young man claiming to be her biological son returned home more than 15 years after he was supposedly assassinated, saying he had actually been held captive in Germany. A few weeks before, for reasons unknown, he had been set free.

According to Dyrholm, the return of the missing king is now no more than a footnote in history books to the much larger story of Margrete’s extraordinary success as a political leader and negotiator.

“The only thing basically I knew about her was that she was the person who unified the north,” she says. “This story about her son is just a sentence in the history books. Of course, we made up some stuff in the film, but it’s based on historical facts and we know how it ended. What we don’t know is whether it was him or not, but a lot of historians now are discussing that.”

In Charlotte Sieling’s film, we see this singular, authoritative female figure engineer a truce between the perpetually embattled Scandinavian countries through the foundation of the Kalmar Union, a regional alliance that held for more than a century. The newcomer’s claim to the succession – backed by Norway, opposed by Sweden and throwing doubt on a new alliance with England – threatens the whole process; what to do with “the false Oluf”, as the jostling factions at court call him, becomes a political decision. At the same time, Margrete is gradually convinced that he is her son. She faces an agonising pull between her feelings as a mother and her driving mission: to end local wars by uniting the regional leaders behind her.

Discussing how she conveys this inner conflict turns into a deep dive into Dyrholm’s approach to performance. She is a determined collaborator. She likes to prepare intensively and to be involved in any project from its early stages. Roles for older women are much more interesting than they once were, especially in Scandinavia; Dyrholm has said before that she has had “much more fun” since turning 40. But it is up to actors themselves, she says, to make that happen.

“That is also my responsibility, I think. If I get a script, I can help make this character more nuanced and interesting by asking the right questions. ‘What about this? Could we imagine this?’”

The script for Margrete: Queen of the North was rewritten as a result of this process of questioning – not only by her, but by other cast and crew. “It’s much better to start the conversation way before. Because then it is actually in the script, [otherwise] you waste a lot of shooting time finding your way. And that is how I like to work with a director, that you get to know the person, to be able to say ‘ah, she thinks like this, she is interested in that but can’t really explain it yet’ and we’ll find our way together.”

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However, on set, she doesn’t want to discuss anything. When the camera starts rolling, she clears her mind. “I find it very inspiring to put myself in a situation where, when the director says ‘action’, I trick my system into thinking I don’t know what happens now. And then you kind of jump into the sea, because then you are free emotionally. I call it conscious unconsciousness. I don’t know if it was Meryl Streep or another great actress who said ‘I don’t know the character before I’ve lived them.’ And that is kind of what I feel as well.”

Like Queen Margrete, Dyrholm is a mother, but that’s irrelevant – she says her own life doesn’t bleed into her performances. “For me, it’s about being present in the moment. I never mix up private stuff when I act; I feel that if I go too private, I’m not in that moment. So I try to borrow the character’s eyes. I have borrowed Margrete’s eyes and I’m looking at a guy who might be her son. Oh my God! It’s another approach, I think. Because when you see a film, I think what is very important for me is to put in moments and cracks in the character where you are invited into that character’s inner chaos.”

One of her frequent collaborators has been Thomas Vinterberg, who cast her in Festen when she was 25. The film – made under the strict rules of the Danish “Dogme” movement – was an unexpected international hit, after which Dyrholm was approached by agencies in Hollywood. She was intimidated and felt unready for that “dangerous world”, she told movie site HeyUGuys back in 2016. “And now, when I feel ready, I’m too old.”

And too normal, as she has joked at other times. She has made films in English, but not with studios. A highlight was Susanne Bier’s Love is All You Need, a romcom in which she was matched with Pierce Brosnan, and she recently made The Almond and the Seahorse, to be released next year, with Rebel Wilson and Charlotte Gainsbourg. She is phenomenally busy, normality notwithstanding, but no closer to a Hollywood breakthrough.

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What struck her at a recent press conference in the United States, she said in an interview on Swedish television, was the weird whiteness of everyone’s teeth. “People can do as they please,” she said. “But quite honestly, why can we not look the way we do?”

There is a problem, she says, with beauty in the movie business: acting involves showing humanity’s dark side which, as Dyrholm says, is not beautiful at all. Having turned a glorious 50, however, she isn’t worried about how people look at her. “I just do it my way,” she says, before returning – just like a normal person – to packing the car.

Margrete: Queen of the North opens the Scandinavian Film Festival, running in Sydney from July 12 to August 7 and Melbourne, July 14 to August 7. scandinavianfilmfestival.com

Other festival highlights

A MATTER OF TRUST

Among the other promising offerings at this year’s Scandinavian Film Festival is a more contemporary outing for Trine Dyrholm. As one of five characters whose lives are turned upside down on a single day, Dyrholm plays a medical consultant forced to accompany a family being repatriated to Afghanistan. Director Annette K. Olesen finds commonalities in the five vignettes that explore what happens when people embark on a journey of which the destination is unknown.

THE WOODCUTTER STORY

In a village in far-north Finland, timber worker Pepe is an innocent and resilient soul who manages to bounce back from a series of misadventures that include the closure of the mill, the death of his mother and the loss of his son to a mysterious exploding ball of light. Critics have called Mikko Myllylahti’s debut feature “surreal”, “quirky” and “calculatedly wayward”. Decide for yourself, as Lynchian weirdness descends on an icy Nordic landscape.

TUESDAY CLUB

We’re a long way from Nordic noir in this Swedish romantic comedy. When Karin (Marie Richardson) discovers her husband is having an affair, her friends suggest a culinary diversion in the form of cooking classes with a renowned local chef. Peter Stormare, perhaps best known for putting his partner in the wood chipper in the Coen brothers’ Fargo, demonstrates his leading-man chops as a reluctant teacher who finds that late-life love is a recipe for renewal.

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