Kristine Froseth Is Here to Learn

This year, the actor Kristine Froseth is proving herself an expert in the intricacies of female relationships. Earlier this spring, she made her stage debut in All Nighter, Natalie Margolin’s new drama centered around a group of female college roommates in rural Pennsylvania on their last full night spent studying together during finals week. Next month, she’ll return as Nan St. George, the focal point of a circle of young and ambitious American women sent to Victorian England to find husbands in the second season of the Apple TV+ drama The Buccaneers, based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel. The two projects are vastly different in setting, style, and tone, but what connects them is Froseth’s vivid portrayals of the two uncompromising young women.

There is a moment in All Nighter, which ran for several months Off Broadway, when things take an unexpected turn. Shock runs audibly through the audience and tension radiates from the stage as a last-minute twist leads to a dark and intense climax, not a predictable ending for a show that begins playfully, with girly pop hits from the 2010s blasting. Froseth’s Darcie is the put-together Type A personality of the friend group. Clad in skinny jeans and Mary Janes with her sights set on law school, she is also the heart of the ensuing drama. For the 29-year-old actor, playing what some might call a villain can be complicated. “Sometimes I would hear people clapping when my character was getting attacked. I thought that was interesting,” she reflects. “A lot of words were thrown around,” she adds, but “I thought if I was going to play Darcie, I would have to understand where she was coming from. I viewed her as someone who can’t cope with her feelings and therefore chooses a different reality to live in.” The audience’s reaction also varied between performances, she says, and it wasn’t always so punishing. “It opens up a lot of conversations about mental health, how people choose to navigate their realities,” she continues. “It’s such a fragile time in life, figuring out so many things. She just needs a lot of help.”

At its core, All Nighter is a play about female friendships during a pivotal phase of life. It’s a short exploration into a world full of nuances and difficulties—some more subtle than others—that might feel very relatable to certain audience members. According to Froseth, though, the dynamic between the cast members could not have been more different. “We became sisters right away,” she says. “When we all met, it was immediate. We knew we were all going to have each other’s backs,” which isn’t always the case, she explains. “We were all super vulnerable and it just clicked. I’m really glad it felt this way on a project like this.” As if to prove her point, Froseth and her co-star Havana Rose Liu are already in Copenhagen working on their next (highly confidential) project together.

It would be hard, I think, not to have a positive experience working with Froseth. Throughout our conversation, she is warm and bubbly, extraordinarily easy to talk to, asking almost as many questions of me as I do of her. Perhaps this is in part because she is coming up in her career as an actor, but I get the sense it is who she is—curious and sweet by nature. Born in New Jersey to Norwegian parents, Froseth’s childhood was spent between both countries, moving every three or four years. During that time, she says she and her two siblings relied on one another through all the changes. Froseth is now based in New York and, though her family is all back in Oslo, she tries to see them as often as possible.

Throughout childhood, Froseth says her one love was horses, and she competed in horseback riding until she was nineteen. “I don’t know why, but when we moved back to the States, I let it go,” she says. “I regret it now. I’m trying to find my stable again and get back into it.” For the upcoming second season of The Buccaneers, which picks up in the aftermath of Nan’s complicated wedding to a Duke, Froseth was excited to be able to ride again onscreen. “My character is kind of the show’s outlier,” she adds. “That’s been fun to explore. She’s way more strong-willed and independent and knows what she wants compared to me, so that’s been a learning experience for me.”

Aside from the costumes and well-written characters, romance and period dramas aren’t exactly Froseth’s personal cup of tea, she confesses. “I’m more into natural realism,” she says, naming Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st and the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night as her favorite films. She describes them as “kind of sad and slow,” intimately depicting substance abuse and depression, respectively. “I really loved the subtleties and the difficulties and the pain, but also the beauty and the hope both those films capture,” she explains. “The way addiction and mental health can be portrayed is not super nuanced and can be really hard to capture and to make it realistic, but it really feels like you’re on the journey with the characters.”

Froseth began her career as a model, a background she says prepared her in some ways for acting, having familiarized her with all the moving parts of a production and being on set. “It probably would have been way more overwhelming if I hadn’t done that,” she says. But she also explains that she had to make conscious shifts in her relationship to the camera when she began acting. “As a model, I felt like I always had to look a certain way. It was more about appearance than the story. I had to let that go. I was mostly just an object,” she says. Becoming an actor meant becoming more involved in the creation of a character. Her first acting gig was the 2017 film Rebel in the Rye, starring Nicholas Hoult as JD Salinger and Zoey Deutch as his partner Oona O’Neill, and she quickly landed supporting roles in two major Netflix films, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser and Apostle, before taking on the title role in the 2019 miniseries Looking for Alaska, based on a John Green novel. It was then that she locked in the same team she’s continued working with until today, and she explains that her acting career has developed organically ever since.

Later this year, Froseth has an indie project lined up and will be taking a major step in directing her first short film. Between projects, she says she loves to hike and go on backpacking trips—often upstate when she’s home in New York or in Norway when she’s visiting family. Eventually, she says she’d love to explore Patagonia and parts of Canada. “I really didn’t like nature as a kid,” she laughs. “It’s so typical! And so annoying.” But she rediscovered her passion on a trip to Maine in her early twenties and was reintroduced on her own terms. “I try to hike as much as I can when I’m not working,” she says. As for her time in front of and, soon, behind he camera, she still sees herself as a student of sorts. “There’s a lot to learn and a lot to grab onto with acting,” she says, “which is great.”

The second season of The Buccaneers premieres June 18 on Apple TV+.